Khloe Kardashian reportedly contracted a staph infection while she was visiting her husband Lamar Odom, who has been hospitalized for a month. She reportedly has a painful lesion on her leg, swollen glands, high fever, sweating and chills. (See TMZ.)

So what is the connection to the False Claims Act? A hospital can be one of the most dangerous places to be whether you are a patient or a visitor. Why? Each time you go to the hospital, you are exposed to a hotbed of lethal infections from a multitude of viruses and bacteria. As a result, hospitals that are complicit with physicians who engage in fraud* by performing unnecessary procedures and/or admitting patients who should be outpatient, subject those very patients to increased risks.

In an article discussing dirty hospital rooms, dated August 11, 2015, it states:

“Nearly one in every 25 hospital patients contracts an infection while they are still in the hospital, according to the US Department of Health and Human Services. Nearly 721,000 hospital-related infections were reported in 2011, resulting in a staggering 75,000 deaths.”

False Claims Act violations such as described above, can result in very grave consequences!

*The reference to the “False Claims Act” and “hospitals that engage in fraud,” is in no way meant to imply that either the current or prior hospitals where Lamar Odom was a patient, was engaged in fraud.