In general, non-disclosure agreements do not effectively silence whistleblowers who would report a fraud designed to bilk government health programs under certain circumstances. In fact, there is strong public policy in favor of protecting whistleblowers who report fraud against the government. However, the Court will consider the scope and the volume of the documents that are taken in making its consideration as well as many other factors in order to determine that the whistleblower acted reasonably and did not conduct extra judiciary discovery.
In fact, the American Psychiatric Association required its task force members for the new Diagnostic Statistical Manual 5 (DSM 5) to execute a non-disclosure agreement, which essentially eliminated transparency. The DSM is the psychiatric catalog of mental illnesses which has grown to over 370 mental illnesses in its latest rendition, including dubious diagnoses such as reading disorder, disorder of written expression, mathematics disorder and caffeine intoxication disorder. Each named disorder is coded for government and private insurance billing purposes.
The interesting part about that is that each member of the 27-person DSM-5 task force, those writing and editing the manual, had to sign a non-disclosure agreement and that 69% of those task force members had ties to the pharmaceutical industry, which arguably can be seen to load the deck for voting purposes.
Unfortunately, the DSM 5 task force made it is easier than ever to diagnose many people with a mental disorder due to the broad categories now available and suspect “illnesses” such as internet gaming addiction, binge eating and caffeine withdrawal. The taxpayer is going to be shelling out big bucks for pharmaceuticals and mental health “treatment” for these things, straining an already overburdened health care system.
Whistleblowers may be entitled to a portion of the recovery of any found to be part of a scheme to defraud government health programs.
It is necessary that an attorney that is competent to advise whistleblowers be utilized early in the reporting of fraud when a non-disclosure agreement is employed so that the information may be effectively employed and the whistleblower may be effectively protected.
