Two doctors are being fired and the pay of at least eight others are being reduced in the wake of a federal monitor’s charges that the medical school has been paying kickbacks to cardiologists resulting in bilking Medicare and Medicaid out of tens of millions of dollars. The federal monitor said that the school’s top officials were complicit in the scheme and directly accused the interim university president, Bruce C. Vladeck of “trying to rebut, refute and bury” information. Vladeck released a letter responding to the report which included instructions to the dean of the medical school to fire or reduce the pay of 10 of the 18 physicians named in the monitor’s report. The kickback accusations are the latest in a line of accusations which caused investigators, after reading an article in a New Jersey legal publication which detailed a $2.2 million settlement by the school to a whistleblower, the former chief of the division of cardiology, who had warned the school that he feared these arrangements were probably illegal and to look further into the matter.

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