MORE ON: Decoding Prime

The president and chief executive officer of Prime Healthcare Services resigned yesterday, leaving as FBI agents are questioning former employees about the firm's billing practices and state legislators prepare to question the company's attorney in a Los Angeles hearing tomorrow regarding... + read more

FBI agents interviewed a former Shasta County hospital patient Friday amid indications of a widening federal inquiry into Medicare billing practices at the Prime Healthcare Services hospital chain. Darlene Courtois, 64, who was featured in a California Watch report last month about unusual... + read more

Stephen K. Doig’s specialty is the analysis of large government datasets, a technique called precision journalism, which uses software to reveal patterns. + read more

Darlene Courtois had never heard of kwashiorkor, a dangerous form of malnutrition, but records show her hospital billed Medicare for treating the condition anyway. + read more

Hospitals have a lot of discretion when deciding what to include in their bills to Medicare, which in 2010 paid out more than $500 billion to health providers. + read more

For three years, a small hospital east of Los Angeles has billed Medicare for the costs of confronting what appears to be a cardiac crisis of unprecedented dimension. Chino Valley Medical Center claimed 35.2 percent of its Medicare patients were suffering from acute heart failure – six times the... + read more