Back in May, a federal jury told UT Southwestern Medical Center to pay more than $3.6 million to a doctor who said he faced racial discrimination and retaliation after resisting pressure to commit billing fraud.
Now a state appeals court has put another doctor employed by the Dallas medical school, Larry Gentilello (right), a big step closer to getting similar allegations in front of jurors.
UT attorneys actually tried to claim that an employee or faculty member could not be protected by the Whistleblower Act if he or she reported an issue internally (never mind an internal policy prohibiting retaliation). Apparently, UT wants employees to go outside of any UT component to report an issue, which would seem to me to be shooting itself squarely in the foot. It would be much more advantageous for any outfit to find out about noncompliance issues internally so that the it could at least do some damage control before the Feds get involved. This astounding contention by UT would have the feds involved from the get-go. (Hey! Attorneys really will burn down a place in order to save it.) As the opinion below indicates, the court did not buy the UT notion in its motion. Gentilello's case is alive and well.
According to UT Southwestern, Rege could not "regulate under" or "enforce" Medicare or Medicaid rules and regulations because he could not himself write the rules or impose fines or criminal liability under those rules and regulations. However, unlike the DWI statute at issue in Needham, the statutes at issue here specifically charge UT Southwestern and its physicians with implementing the laws at the hospital level. While Rege may not have had the power to write the rules or assess fines or other criminal sanctions for a violation of the rules, he had both the power and the duty to enforce those rules and regulations at UT Southwestern. Rege specifically testified that he had the ability to decide whether UT Southwestern could bill Medicare or Medicaid or not. There was also evidence that he could immediately stop any procedure in violation of the applicable rules and regulations and discipline an offending physician. Rege conceded at the hearing that he enforced the laws insofar as he set policies and procedures for Medicare and Medicaid compliance. He also conceded that he had the ability to "regulate, enforce, and investigate any irregular billings." Rege also testified that he had the authority to enforce faculty supervision on residents.
In March, Hash lodged an ethics complaint through the university system's hot line and the state's Office of Inspector General abuse and fraud reporting system , according to court documents. A few days later, Hash was relieved of his vice dean job and was demoted to associate professor without tenure, the suit says. The letter to Hash from the dean of the Health Science Center says his performance in the role was unsatisfactory.
I have to wonder what sort of "due process" Texas A&M administrators gave to this tenured professor before they took his tenure away. The article, linked below, says they got around to giving it back to him later.
Hash in 2008 became vice dean of academic affairs and associate professor with tenure. The suit says Hash later learned that "certain high level employees/officers of the defendants and/or their family members had financial interests" in the medical building.
I stumbled across the "Undercover Lawyer" website a few days ago and held off posting about it until I had a chance to really check it out. It offers a great deal of free resources and information for embattled employees, although, inevitably, it tries to sell readers some material, as well, which is something all businesses try to do. Frankly, I find the items it offers for sale as interesting too. (No, nobody is giving me any promotional fees here!)
The Undercover Lawyer allows site visitors to sign up for a series of free e-mails in which he offers general advice to employees in trouble. He also offers some very informative podcasts, which readers can access via the website or through iTunes. I have listened to four or five of the podcasts, about a half-hour long, and they are chock full of good information. I particularly liked the podcast titled "10 Tips When Facing Termination." I also visited the forum on the website, where people can connect with other people facing similar workplace issues. Issues like retaliation, discrimination, the EEOC and many other relevant topics were and are being discussed there.
In short, this is a great website for getting some good, basic information for fighting back. I strongly recommend that any readers who fear for their jobs visit this website. It does not deal solely with academic medical workplace issues, but often, as far as the law is concerned, a workplace is a workplace and principles of decency should prevail in all jobs. This site is worth a look. I find it astounding that this much information is being offered for free.
As regular readers know, I refer to compensation plans that administrators can expand and contract for individual faculty at will as "accordion" plans, after the oh-so-flexible musical instrument. It appears the accordion is playing at UT Southwestern as well. Here's the key paragraph from the UT Southwestern faculty compensation plan:
Total Salary: funds received on a monthly basis at a rate established in the Memorandum of Appointment. Compensation paid in excess of the base salary (supplemental compensation) may rise and fall from year to year in recognition of changing duties, responsibilities, accomplishments, and productivity over and above the basic requirements of a faculty member's rank. Payment of salary at the base salary rate is subject to continued satisfactory performance.
Click on the link below to see UT Southwestern's entire, one-page plan.
Let me ask you, gentle reader, just who controls things like changing duties, faculty responsibilities, and the interpretation of accomplishments? And as for productivity, allow me to repeat my little syllogism yet again:
Access to resources controls productivity. Administrators control access to resources. Administrators control productivity.
Finally, please allow me to remind my readers that the University of Texas System has publicly stated that tenure protects a position and not compensation.
Recruiting top-notch scientists to Texas has been difficult, Shine
said, because of a perception in the outside world that Texas is
unreceptive toward such science-related issues as evolution and climate
change.
Of course, this absolves UT and its component institutions of any blame whatsoever, doesn't it? Why, it's the fault of the citizens of Texas, according to this theory, not anything that UT's administrators have done. What a self-serving little theory.
An inconvenient truth concerning the global warming and evolution excuses, however, is that there is a little more to the story. UT has taken action against faculty that has gotten national attention. Perhaps the most visible of these actions involved the reduction in force the UT system sanctioned and the UTMB administration carried out against faculty in 2008, recently resulting in a censure from the AAUP. Utterly failing to involve faculty governance in the process except as window dressing toward the end, UTMB administration employed a stacked RIF selection committee and a stacked RIF appeals committee to carry out its agenda. On average, the selection committee, which included the Provost's neighbor and a disproportionate number of people from the Provost's former department before his promotion, had about eight minutes to consider the careers of faculty being considered for a cut. It is impossible to digest a substantial curriculum vita in only eight minutes, much less the volumes of other information that these faculty generated throughout their careers. Of course faculty names had been presented to the committee by chairs, who had largely already made the decisions.
As for the RIF appeals committee, it was uniformly staffed with management personnel who also held faculty appointments. (UTMB President David Callender holds a faculty appointment.) This committee only upheld about three appeals, and one successful appellant's contract was not renewed a month later, making the whole process meaningless for him.
Then there are the well-publicized cases in which UT has crushed dissent, such as Dr. Larry Gentilello's concerns that UT Southwestern was not in conformance with Medicare rules. He was the chair of a department until he made his concerns known to UT Southwestern management (not a third party), and suddenly found himself demoted and his pay cut. (More about UT Southwestern and its Medicare problems can be found on the blog UT Southwestern and Parkland Hospital Stories. (See additional stories concerning this in the Zemanta box below.) Dr. Gentilello's case is still under way and on appeal right now.
Click on the highlighted text to read about similar cases involving Dr. Robert Klebe of UTHSC San Antonio, and Dr. Naiel Nassar, yet another unfortunate instance occurring at UT Southwestern. Dr. Klebe's case is still ongoing with UT appealing to the Fifth Circuit in May after having lost two separate jury awards in favor of Doctor Klebe of $900,000 and $400,000, and UT has vowed to appeal Doctor Nasser's case after a jury awarded him $3.6 million dollars.
No, there's more than evolution and global warming going on here. UT needs to stop looking at Charles Darwin and Al Gore and start looking in the mirror for the root of its problems. Of course, all that hot air accompanying its excuses may well be contributing to global warming.
The delegates voted after considering an association report that said the process by which the medical branch terminated 125 faculty members — 42 of them protected by tenure — after Hurricane Ike was “seriously deficient,” “arbitrary and unreasonable” and full of “shortcomings in academic due process.”
Some wronged faculty have waited a long time for this. This is a stain on UTMB's reputation that the institution will not soon outlive. Administrators have only themselves to blame.
Delegates to the Ninety-sixth Annual Meeting of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) voted on June 12 to place Clark Atlanta University (GA) and the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston on the AAUP’s list of censured administrations.
Recent Comments