The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a federal court didn’t have jurisdiction to hear state law claims of unfair competition in a lawsuit that led to a multi-million dollar jury award against Millennium Health. But it didn’t issue any opinion on whether the conduct in dispute violated the federal Anti-kickback Statute or Stark law. The appeals court explained that Ameritox had really raised state law issues when it argued that point-of-care testing (POCT) cups Millennium supplied to referring physicians for free violated state unfair competition laws because those practices violated federal AKS and Stark law. Declaring that the federal trial court’s decision to hear the “novel and complex state-law claims” was an abuse of discretion, the appeals court said it “resulted in the needless creation of new law for nine states and permitted parties that were either ignorant of the law or disingenuous to waste scarce judicial resources.” Millennium and Ameritox are competitors who provide drug testing to physicians’ patients. POCT cups include chemically activated strips that detect drugs in urine samples. These strips allow the physicians to obtain limited information in their office about whether drugs are present in the urine. They then send the sample in…
