Suit claims unnecessary surgeries at Tenet

The action is the most recent development in allegations that doctors at the hospital chain's subsidiary performed unwarranted procedures to boost revenue.

By Katherine Vogt, AMNews staff. May 19, 2003.

Tenet Healthcare Corp., the nation's second largest for-profit hospital chain, is being sued for allegedly creating heart patients out of healthy people as a means of boosting revenue.

A joint complaint representing 82 patients was filed in a Shasta County (Calif.) Superior Court on April 28. The lawsuit claims that doctors at the Redding Medical Center performed hundreds of unnecessary invasive heart procedures -- including some that led to death -- to increase profits at the Tenet subsidiary.

Tenet, the medical center and a half-dozen physicians are named as defendants in the lawsuit, which seeks unspecified compensatory and punitive damages for fraud, battery, conspiracy, wrongful death, abuse, negligence and more.

Attorney Robert Simpson, who filed the complaint, said Tenet's business practices were behind the alleged wrongdoing. "We believe that the Tenet health system practices what we call 'Wall Street medicine;' They practice bottom-line medicine to drive their stock prices up."

Simpson said he expects hundreds of additional patients to file claims in the next few months.

A spokesman for Santa Barbara, Calif.-based Tenet declined to comment on the lawsuit, citing a company policy about pending litigation.