Black doctor sues TMH, claims discrimination

Jeffrey Schweers | Tallahassee Democrat

A black doctor who worked for decades at Tallahassee Memorial Healthcare claims he has been discriminated against by being kept off an on-call list, being forced to take on a larger load of indigent patients and having his medical staff privileges withheld.

The complaint, filed in federal court in Tallahassee, claimed Dr. Joe Webster was discriminated against because he is black, an issue that drew media attention two years ago when he accused TMH of unfair practices and conducting a "witch hunt" against him. In December 2016, about a dozen people took to the streets outside TMH protesting the hospital's treatment of Webster, a gastroenterologist.

In a prepared statement, TMH said: "Tallahassee Memorial HealthCare addresses all issues, including lawsuits, in a very serious manner. However, we cannot comment on any specific pending litigation."

Webster's complaint, filed by Jack Scarola, a partner of Searcy Denney Scarola Barnhart & Shipley, contends the 772-bed hospital deprived him of his rights by “discriminating against the Plaintiff on the basis of his race, by denying him equal protection under the law, and by denying him substantive due process."

The hospital has about 550 physicians and over 4,500 employees.

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As a result of the policies imposed on him, Webster earned less than his white counterparts practicing in the same field of medicine, according to the lawsuit.

“The defendant’s policy and custom of racial discrimination was the moving force behind the harm inflicted on the plaintiff,” the lawsuit said.

Webster demanded a jury trial and seeks in excess of $100,000. He is also seeking compensatory damages, attorney’s cost and fees.

Webster began working at TMH in 1980 and for decades was the only black gastroenterologist at the hospital except for a brief, 3-year period. Everything was fine and he enjoyed full privileges “without incident or interruption” right until about September of 2015, the complaint said.

After that time the hospital began systematically preventing Webster from doing his job, according to the lawsuit, first by taking away his medical privileges because of his race, denying him access afforded to other medical staff members, and imposing obligations upon him for treating indigent patients that were not imposed on medical staff who weren’t black.

Webster started to see an increase in his practice of the number of indigent patients and people with limited income to pay market rates for his services, the complaint says. He frequently accepted Medicaid payments.

When his patients required endoscopy procedures, Webster used the equipment and rooms at TMH. “When the patients or third-party payors reimbursed the Defendant profited by providing the services,” the complaint says.

Because Medicare rates drive payment formulas, when Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements decreased, Webster’s patients placed a higher economic burden on TMH.

To make sure the hospital is meeting its mandate to provide specialty care, all specialty physicians are placed on a specialty “on-call” roster as a condition to receive hospital staff privileges.

Any time a patient is admitted to the ER who requires a consultation with a specialist, the ER refers to the call roster to find the appropriate on-call specialist.

As long as patients can pay or third parties pay a reasonable rate for such services, the on-call service generates new patients and more revenue, the claim says. But if the patient is indigent, the on-call services becomes a financial burden.

“For many years the balance between the rewards of on-call services substantially outweighed the burdens until the Medicaid reimbursement rates steadily decreased and the indigent patient population at (TMH) steadily increased,” the complaint says.

From the time Webster was admitted to the staff at TMH, he was excluded from the on-call roster, and gastroenterology services were exclusively the domain of his white competitors, the complaint says.

The hospital then terminated his staff privileges under the pretext that he failed to meet his on-call responsibilities and other obligations under the bylaws, the lawsuit claims.

Contact Schweers at jschweers@tallahassee.com. Follow him on Twitter @jeffschweers.