Mandatory COVID Vaccine Fights Continue
The United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania granted a healthcare system’s motion to exclude two expert reports in a case arising out of a physician’s claim that the system wrongfully denied her a religious exemption from their mandatory COVID-19 vaccination policy. The court found the first witness, who was a medical doctor, was not qualified to opine on the reasonableness of the physician’s religious beliefs. The court found that the second witness, also a medical doctor, was not reliable in rebutting the system’s undue hardship defense, as the physician’s expert cited no support for the claims he made in his report. Slattery v. Main Line Health Inc.
Court Weighs in on Whether There Is Any Such Thing as Free Lunch
In a qui tam lawsuit brought under the False Claims Act (“FCA”), a relator alleged violations of the anti-kickback statute based on claims that a medical device company had provided free lunches and other gifts to cath lab employees at a community hospital and a Veterans Administration (“VA”) hospital in order to entice them to purchase its devices. Among its “various-and-sundry” rulings, the United States District Court for the District of Kansas dismissed all claims against the community hospital on summary judgment, finding that providing an average of eight modest in-service lunches a year was not enough to induce the hospital to order medical devices from the device company. However, the district court allowed various claims involving the device company and VA hospital to proceed, finding there were genuine questions of material fact as to whether the device company provided meals more frequently to the VA hospital, whether those meals were provided along with education or not, and whether the device company provided gifts (NASCAR tickets, an iphone and an ipad) to the person who made decisions on device purchases at the VA hospital. U.S. ex rel. Schroeder v. Hutchinson Regional Med. Cntr.