The US Supreme Court Thursday handed a partial victory to a Massachusetts family who sued the country’s largest owner of psychiatric hospitals over the death of their daughter. But the justices sent the case back to a lower court for further review.
Both sides seemed to find something to like in the complex decision written by Justice Clarence Thomas. And lawyers and organizations who had been following the case disagreed about the ultimate meaning of the decision, which was unanimous.
The question at hand was whether Universal Health Services, a Fortune 500 company that owns the Arbour psychiatric facilities in Massachusetts, violated the law when it allegedly permitted an unsupervised nurse practitioner to prescribe medication to 19-year-old Yarushka Rivera. Virtually every therapist who came in contact with Rivera at the company’s clinic in Lawrence was unlicensed and unsupervised, her family has alleged.
Rivera’s parents claimed Universal defrauded the government by not following Massachusetts regulations requiring that nurse practitioners prescribe medication only under the supervision of a certified staff psychiatrist — while still charging the government for those services.
Universal argued that its actions did not constitute fraud because the regulations did not explicitly say proper supervision was a requirement of payment.
