Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott‘s office this morning announced that it had secured a $1.4 million settlement from Planned Parenthood of the Gulf Coast after determining in a state-run investigation that the organization had defrauded Medicaid.
PPGC denies the charges.
According to a press release, the AG’s investigation was prompted by a whistleblower lawsuit alleging hijinks at PPGC, which runs clinics in Texas and Louisiana. The AG’s office says that PPGC fraudulently billed Medicaid for “services that were never actually rendered, not medically necessary, and were not covered by the Medicaid program – and were therefore not eligible for reimbursement,” reads and email release from the agency. “For example, state investigators determined that [PPGC] falsified material information in patients’ medical records in order to support fraudulent reimbursement claims to the Medicaid program.”
The settlement, for $1.4 in funds PPGC allegedly improperly billed Medicaid for, closes the AG’s investigation.
But PPGC denies it has done anything wrong and in a statement said it chose to end the matter in order to “devote all of our time and energy to delivering high-quality, affordable health care,” according to an emailed statement. “The allegations in this complaint are baseless and we are ending this case as a practical matter. Continuing this litigation in the hostile environment for women’s health would have ensured a lengthy and costly process that would have distracted our energies and required us to share the private medical information of thousands of women,” reads the release.
This article appears in July 19 • 2013.