United States, ex rel. Sun v. Baxter Healthcare Corp., No. 13-2083 (1st Cir. 2014)
Annotate this CaseVen-A-Care of the Florida Keys, Inc. filed the first of two qui tam actions alleging that Baxter Healthcare Corporation had defrauded the federal Medicaid and Medicare programs. Ven-A-Care and Baxter eventually reached a settlement agreement. Before the district court dismissed Ven-A-Care’s action against Baxter, Linnette Sun and Greg Hamilton filed a qui tam action against Baxter. Baxter moved for partial summary judgment, asserting that the settlement had released Sun and Hamilton’s claims. Sun and Hamilton then filed a Fed. R. Civ. P. 60(b) motion requesting a reopening of the Ven-A-Care judgment, arguing that the Ven-A-Care settlement could not release their claims until they got a fairness hearing under the False Claims Act. The district court denied the motion and dismissed Sun and Hamilton’s suit, concluding that the Ven-A-Care complaint stated all the essential facts of the fraud alleged by Sun and Hamilton and thus had triggered the False Claims Act’s first-to-file bar. The First Circuit affirmed, holding that because Ven-A-Care’s earlier-filed complaint already provided the essential facts about the same scheme pled in Sun and Hamilton’s complaint, section 3730(b)(5) of the False Claims Act prevented Sun and Hamilton’s suit from going forward.
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