MORE ON: kwashiorkor

After billing Medicare for treating more than 1,100 cases of a rare affliction, a Prime Healthcare Services hospital in Redding abruptly stopped last year, state health records show. The change occurred soon after California Watch published a story about aggressive billing practices at the hospital... + read more

A Prime Healthcare Services hospital in Redding broke state law when it publicized a patient’s confidential medical files in an effort to discredit a California Watch news report, state regulators say. The state Department of Public Health on Tuesday issued five "deficiencies"... + read more

Darlene Courtois describes herself as overweight, not emaciated, so she was surprised to learn that her hospital billed Medicare for treating her for kwashiorkor, a dangerous form of malnutrition. + read more

To report this story, California Watch relied on Medicare data, hospital records and, critically, government billing records normally kept secret. + read more

Journalists find stories in all sorts of places. I have spent much of my journalism career, both in newsrooms and classrooms, finding stories in data. That’s how I found myself crunching data for California Watch, a nonprofit investigative news operation that is part of the Center for... + read more

Federal prosecutors in Maryland have filed a false claims lawsuit against a hospital that reported an outbreak of a rare Third World nutritional disorder among its Medicare patients. In the complaint, the government said Kernan Hospital in Baltimore fraudulently billed Medicare about $1.6... + read more