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Verdicts and Settlements

Tenet Settles Over Unnecessary Surgeries

By Erik Cummins, San Francisco Daily Journal

Tenet Healthcare Care Corp., the country's second-largest hospital chain, agreed Tuesday to pay $395 million to settle complaints that doctors at its former facility in Redding performed unnecessary heart procedures on healthy patients.

The Texas company will establish a fund to compensate 769 plaintiffs who filed suit in Shasta County Superior Court. In re: Tenet Healthcare Cases Ill. JCCP 4301.

"This is a huge amount of money - it's fair," said Luke Ellis, an Orinda lawyer representing 186 former Tenet patients. "I think [Tenet] really stepped up to the plate. We could have been litigating this for decades."

Trevor Fetter, Tenet's president and chief executive officer, said the settlement puts an end to a sad chapter for the hospital chain and patients of the former Redding Medical Center.

"By settling all the cases at once, we put this matter behind both the plaintiffs and us, and we bring closure to this unfortunate event," Fetter said.

Nancy Hersh, a plaintiffs personal injury lawyer with Hersh & Hersh in San Francisco, likened the outcome to recent multimillion-dollar settlements in Catholic priest molestation cases.

"But here, you have intentional injury for profit," said Hersh, who represents plaintiffs in medical device and drug cases. "The conduct in the Redding case was quite egregious."

Russell Reiner, a lawyer with Redding's Reiner, Simpson, Timmons & Slaughter, represents 345 former patients of Redding Medical Center. "My clients and their families suffered horrible complications," Reiner said. "These were completely healthy people with no heart problems."

Ellis, a partner at Gillin, Jacobson, Ellis & Larsen, said his clients suffered complications including stroke, heart attacks, infections and paralysis. Ninety-four of the 769 plaintiffs have died.

Problems at the hospital began to surface in 2002, when a former patient tipped off the FBI that the facility had been billing the state and federal governments for unnecessary angiograms and heart bypass and valve surgeries.

At first, news of the investigation outraged residents of the region, who supported the doctors and the hospital. Many former patients and their families rallied at the Shasta County courthouse and a local mall against the allegations, Reiner said.

The doctors, he said, had been advertised by Tenet as among the country's best, and they had performed thousands of operations during the 1990s and the early part of this decade.

"Some of our clients were at those rallies - until they found out they had been lied to by these surgeons and in no way needed the surgery," Reiner said.

Public opinion began to change several months following an October 2002 FBI raid, when Tenet paid $54 million to settle the billing fraud investigation.

Next, the Department of Health and Human Services said it would cut federal funding for the hospital unless Tenet sold the facility. In June, Tenet completed a sale to Hospital Partners of America, Inc.

In January, Dr. Chae Hyun Moon, a cardiologist and members of the center's former Cardiology Associates of Northern California settled with their former patients for an undisclosed amount. Moon is no longer practicing medicine.

With the latest settlement, Reiner said, "the community will see this was a horrific tragedy."

The settlement does not resolve claims against a group of former surgeons at the Redding hospital, now called the Shasta Regional Medical Center.

"We intend on seeing the matter through the court system," said Robert Zimmerman, a Sacramento lawyer for Dr. Fidel Realyvazquez, Jr., the doctor who led the Redding cardiovascular surgery team. "We have no intention of settling these cases."

Realyvazquez "is a skilled and caring physician, only providing necessary and appropriate cardiovascular care," he said. "He hopes to return to his practice."

Ellis said the surgeons were most at fault for his clients' injuries.

"They had the responsibility and opportunity to understand and see," he said.

Realyvazquez has taken time off from his practice to help defend the case, Zimmerman said. The first trial against Realyvazquez and three fellow surgeons is set for July 25 in Shasta County Superior Court.