Reporting Highlights
- A long time of Misbehavior: Lincare has repeatedly landed on Medicare’s equal of probation; the corporate has a dismal historical past of exploiting the federal government and ailing sufferers.
- Too Large to Ban: Regardless of Lincare’s observe file, Medicare, which offers a lot of the firm’s revenues, has by no means sought to bar the corporate from the Medicare system.
- Tolerating Wrongdoing: Confronted with $60 billion a yr in fraud, Medicare spends tens of millions chasing firms however accepts penalties which might be solely a fraction of the income made on misbehavior.
These highlights had been written by the reporters and editors who labored on this story.
For Lincare, paying multimillion-dollar authorized settlements is an integral a part of doing enterprise.
The corporate, the biggest distributor of house oxygen tools in the USA, admitted billing Medicare for ventilators it knew prospects weren’t utilizing (2024) and overcharging Medicare and 1000’s of aged sufferers (2023). It settled allegations of violating a regulation towards kickbacks (2018) and charging Medicare for sufferers who had died (2017). The corporate resolved lawsuits alleging a “nationwide scheme to pay physicians kickbacks to refer their sufferers to Lincare” (2006) and that it falsified claims that its prospects wanted oxygen (2001). (Lincare admitted wrongdoing in solely the 2 most up-to-date settlements.)
Such a litany of Medicare-related misconduct could be anticipated to impress drastic motion from the Division of Well being and Human Companies, which oversees the federal medical health insurance program that covers 1 in 6 Individuals. Given that the majority of Lincare’s estimated $2.4 billion in annual revenues are paid by Medicare, HHS wields super energy over the corporate.
Certain sufficient, as a part of the 2023 settlement, HHS positioned Lincare on the company’s equal of probation, a so-called company integrity settlement. The foreboding-sounding doc features a “loss of life penalty” provision: Any “materials breach” of the probation settlement, which runs for 5 years, “constitutes an impartial foundation for Lincare’s exclusion from participation within the Federal well being care packages.” Such a ban may successfully kill Lincare’s enterprise.
That sounds dire. Besides that earlier than that company integrity settlement was signed in 2023, Lincare was below the identical type of probation, with the identical loss of life penalty provision, from 2018 to 2023, and violated its phrases. From 2006 to 2011, Lincare was equally on probation and in addition violated the phrases, in accordance with the federal government. And earlier than that — properly, you get the image. Lincare has been on probation 4 occasions since 2001. And regardless of a sample not solely of fraud, however of breaking its probation agreements, Lincare has by no means been required to do greater than pay settlements that quantity to pennies relative to its income.
This isn’t an aberration. Whereas HHS routinely imposes the loss of life penalty on small operations, it has by no means barred a nationwide Medicare provider like Lincare from persevering with to do enterprise with the federal government. Some firms, it appears, are too huge to ban.
Lincare’s prolonged file of misbehavior isn’t a shock to folks within the medical tools enterprise. What is stunning is the federal authorities’s willingness to drag its punches with an organization that has fleeced taxpayers and aged prospects many times.
Federal officers have by no means pursued the corporate executives who oversee this conduct though two of them, Chief Working Officer Greg McCarthy and Chief Compliance Officer Jenna Pedersen, have labored at Lincare by all 4 of the corporate’s probationary intervals. Nobody has confronted felony costs for exercise the federal government’s personal investigators deemed fraud.
Medicare has continued to pay Lincare billions at the same time as lots of the firm’s prospects revile it. Evaluations on customer-review web sites are lacerating, and complaints to state attorneys common abound. On the Higher Enterprise Bureau’s web site, 888 reviewers gave Lincare a median rating of 1.3 out of 5. They cite soiled and damaged tools, costs that proceed even after tools has been returned, harassing gross sales and assortment calls, and nightmarish customer support. As one particular person wrote in April, Lincare is “working a rip-off the place they’ve assured earnings” and “the client can’t do a factor.”
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HHS has at all times been reluctant to chop off huge suppliers. Medicare’s first goal is to verify nothing interrupts the stream of medicines, gadgets and companies to beneficiaries. And had been HHS to hunt to ban Lincare, the corporate would absolutely launch an extended, expensive authorized warfare. However even when the price of such fight reached many tens of millions of {dollars}, it might nonetheless be a tiny fraction of the quantity misplaced to fraud, which is yet one more contributor to the hovering medical prices that bedevil the nation. “That is taxpayer cash,” stated Jerry Martin, a former U.S. legal professional who represented an ex-Lincare govt in a whistleblower go well with towards the corporate. “We have to pay those who don’t have 4 corporate-integrity agreements.”
Weak enforcement just isn’t the one drawback. Lincare is paid to lease oxygen tools to sufferers, with HHS overlaying a lot of the month-to-month payments. However these rental charges usually add as much as many occasions what it might value merely to purchase the tools. “If this had been a rational nation,” Bruce Vladeck, who ran Medicare from 1993 to 1997, instructed ProPublica, “the federal government would purchase one million [oxygen] concentrators and pay Amazon or someone to ship them.”
In a seven-month investigation, ProPublica examined how Medicare’s largest supplier of house medical tools has managed to reap the benefits of its prospects for 1 / 4 of a century whereas warding off significant enforcement. ProPublica interviewed greater than 60 present and former staff and executives, Medicare and Justice Division officers, affected person advocates, and well being care consultants. ProPublica additionally reviewed dozens of courtroom circumstances involving Lincare and 1000’s of pages of inner firm paperwork, gross sales displays and emails.
The investigation reveals a dismal image of an organization with a gross sales tradition that is dependent upon squeezing infirm and aged sufferers and the federal government for each penny. Lincare staff are pressured to promote — whether or not a buyer wants a product or not — on ache of shedding their jobs.
And the corporate’s file of misbehavior and battle extends far past its gross sales and billing practices. Lincare has paid $9.5 million in settlements for information breaches and mishandling affected person and worker information. It has confronted claims of violating wage guidelines, harassing prospects with gross sales and assortment calls, and tolerating racist feedback to an African American worker. (Lincare misplaced the latter go well with at trial and is interesting.) The corporate has repeatedly sparred in courtroom with former executives, together with a 2017 go well with during which longtime govt Sharon Ford claimed that the corporate had cheated her out of a $1 million bonus. (A choose dominated in favor of Ford at trial earlier than the case was overturned on attraction.) Ford testified that Lincare had earned an trade status as “The Evil Empire.” And when Lincare’s CEO, Crispin Teufel, resigned final yr to change into CEO of a rival firm, Lincare sued him for breach of contract and misappropriating commerce secrets and techniques. Teufel finally admitted to downloading confidential firm information and was blocked from taking the brand new job. (Teufel didn’t reply to requests for remark. His substitute, Jeff Barnhard, took over as Lincare’s CEO in July 2023.)
Lincare declined a number of requests to make executives obtainable for interviews. After ProPublica offered a prolonged doc itemizing each assertion on this article, together with separate such letters to executives McCarthy and Pedersen, the corporate responded with a three-paragraph assertion. It asserted that Lincare is “dedicated to delivering high-quality and clinically applicable tools, provides, and companies” however acknowledged “missteps previously.” The corporate stated its “new management” had “commenced a complete evaluate of our insurance policies and procedures to assist guarantee we’re complying totally with all state and federal rules” and that “investments and enhancements we now have made over the past a number of months will assist stop these points from repeating sooner or later.” Lincare didn’t reply to follow-up questions requesting examples of the steps the corporate says it’s taking, together with whether or not it has terminated any executives as a part of this push.
When ProPublica requested a high Medicare enforcer why Lincare had eluded banishment, her reply recommended she views probation as a seamless ed class relatively than a harsh punishment. “It’s like taking a university course,” stated Tamara Forys, who’s in command of administrative and civil treatments for HHS’ Workplace of Inspector Normal. “On the finish of the day, it’s actually as much as you to alter your company tradition and to review, to be taught to go the category … to embrace that and take these classes realized and transfer them ahead.” A spokesperson for the Facilities for Medicare and Medicaid Companies, which runs Medicare, declined to touch upon Lincare however stated the company “is dedicated to stopping fraud and defending folks with Medicare from falling sufferer to fraud.”
There’s little incentive to chorus from misbehaving in an setting that tolerates dangerous conduct, stated Lewis Morris, who was chief counsel to HHS’ Workplace of Inspector Normal from 2002 to 2012. “So long as that [settlement] examine is lower than the quantity you stole, it’s a great enterprise proposition.”
Certainly, Lincare has counted on the federal government’s tepid response, two former firm executives instructed ProPublica. High administration, they stated, responds to fraud warnings by conducting a cost-benefit evaluation. “I’ve sat in conferences the place they stated, ‘We’d have $5 to $10 million danger — if caught,’” stated Owen Kirk Staggs, who ran considered one of Lincare’s companies in 2017 and fell out with the corporate. “‘However we’ve made $50 million. So let’s go for it. The chance is well worth the reward.’”
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Libby, Montana, offers a glimpse of the best way Lincare operates. Oxygen is an pressing want on this mountain city of two,857. Libby suffers from the lingering results of “the worst case of commercial poisoning of a complete neighborhood in American historical past,” within the phrases of the Environmental Safety Company. An open-pit vermiculite mine, which operated from 1963 to 1990, coated the realm — and residents’ lungs — with needle-like asbestos fibers. Greater than 2,000 Libby residents have been recognized with respiratory ailments since then; some 700 have died.
A whole bunch of ailing residents relied on Lincare for house concentrators, which give practically pure oxygen extracted from room air. Medicare and Medicare Benefit plans (which the federal government additionally funds) lined 80% of the month-to-month rental of about $135; sufferers paid the remaining 20%.
In 2020, Brandon Haugen seen one thing suspicious in Lincare’s payments. Haugen was a customer support consultant on the firm’s native distribution web site, considered one of 700 such places across the nation. (Lincare serves 1.8 million respiratory sufferers in 48 states.)
Lincare was allowed to cost sufferers and their insurers for a most of 36 months below federal guidelines. After that time, sufferers may use the tools with out additional cost. Lincare, nevertheless, saved billing native sufferers and their Medicare Benefit plans far past 36 months — in some circumstances, for years. To Haugen, this regarded like fraud.
Haugen conferred with heart supervisor Ben Montgomery. The 2, who had grown up within the space, had been buddies since seventh grade, after attending to know one another at summer season Bible camp. Then 38, earnest and simply starting to grey out of their boyishness, the 2 males had been involved. The sufferers the lads handled had been their neighbors.
A regional Lincare supervisor assured them that charging past 36 months for Medicare Benefit sufferers “is the proper technique to invoice.” Skeptical, Montgomery raised the problem with Lincare’s headquarters in Clearwater, Florida. Lincare’s compliance director instructed him, in accordance with Montgomery, that “it’s the sufferers’ drawback to repair it if they need it to cease”; that was “simply the way it labored.” Additional questions, despatched to Lincare’s chief compliance officer, Pedersen, went nowhere. “It appeared fairly apparent they had been properly conscious of this,” Montgomery instructed ProPublica. “For me, these had been my prospects that you simply had been screwing over.”
Amongst them was Neil Bauer, now 80, who lives in a ramshackle home “out within the boondocks,” as he put it, 38 miles southeast of Libby. Bauer spent his profession as a barber, head of investigations for the county sheriff’s division and a member of the native faculty board. He’s been on oxygen for greater than a decade and shortly will get in need of breath. “I can’t do stuff a lot now,” he stated. His spouse is on oxygen, too. “We simply have a sick household,” Bauer stated.
Lincare had saved billing Bauer for his concentrator for seven years after it was alleged to cease. The month-to-month copays weren’t large, however they added as much as $2,325 that he shouldn’t have been charged over that interval, a frightening sum for Bauer, who lives on a hard and fast earnings — and a hefty mark-up over the price of the tools, which could be bought on-line for $799. For its half, Medicare Benefit paid Lincare $9,299 for Bauer’s concentrator throughout this era, together with one other $5,760 for the months Lincare was legally permitted to invoice. All instructed, the rental funds to Lincare, throughout licensed and unauthorized intervals, had been $16,547 for that one $799 piece of kit. “We paid endlessly,” stated Bauer. “By no means was I instructed that we may have one with out having to pay something.”
Haugen and Montgomery studied billing information. Among the many prospects of their tiny workplace, Lincare was improperly charging a minimum of 33 folks and their Medicare plans. The 2 started to surprise how far this drawback prolonged. An worker in Idaho confirmed the identical apply was occurring there. “In my thoughts,” Montgomery stated, “I went, ‘That is Libby, Montana. Multiply that by each heart within the nation. That is clearly loads greater deal.’”
Montgomery and Haugen had seen sufficient. On Jan. 18, 2021, they emailed a joint resignation letter to Lincare’s high administration, recounting their issues about billing that “seemingly impacts 1000’s of sufferers firm huge.” Citing the dearth of response from company officers, they wrote, “we will solely conclude that it is a identified problem that’s being lined up by Lincare.”
Haugen had 10 kids. Montgomery had 4. Neither man had one other job lined up. “Had this not occurred,” stated Montgomery, who had been on the firm for 13 years, “I might have seen myself retiring from Lincare.”
As an alternative, they turned whistleblowers. They retained a regulation agency and sued Lincare in Spokane, Washington, the location of Lincare’s regional headquarters. After federal prosecutors determined to again the case, Lincare settled in August 2023. The corporate admitted to overbilling Medicare plans and sufferers throughout the nation for years and paid $29 million to settle the matter, with $5.7 million of that going to Montgomery, Haugen and their legal professionals. Dan Fruchter, the assistant U.S. legal professional main the federal government’s case, instructed ProPublica that the overbillings seemingly concerned “tens of 1000’s” of sufferers.
Lincare agreed to its fourth stint of probation with HHS; the brand new corporate-integrity settlement took impact on the day after the earlier one expired. The conduct Montgomery and Haugen flagged had gone on for years whereas the corporate was already on probation. However Lincare received the federal government legal professionals to agree that no one would attempt to impose the Medicare loss of life penalty. Lincare asserted within the settlement that it had put in software program (which it did solely after studying of the federal government investigation) that can stop billing past 36 months. Lincare promised to make sure “full and well timed” compliance with the settlement and stop future wrongdoing.
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Medicare fraud, together with within the “sturdy medical tools” class that Lincare operates in, has lengthy been an intractable drawback. It value the U.S. Treasury an estimated $60 billion in 2023 alone.
The federal government deploys giant sums to attempt to cease it. HHS’ inspector common’s workplace has a $432 million price range and a employees of 1,600. These assets are successfully prolonged by whistleblowers — a lot of the circumstances towards Lincare have been such fits — who can obtain a share of a civil settlement in the event that they reveal wrongdoing, and by federal prosecutors, who may deliver circumstances or be part of these filed by whistleblowers. Final yr HHS recovered $3.2 billion from fraudulent schemes.
However the company’s enforcers have wielded their largest deterrent virtually totally towards small perpetrators. In 2023, they banned 2,112 small companies and people from Medicare reimbursement.
HHS hasn’t executed the identical with firms that function on a nationwide scale. Forys, the company enforcer, stated she worries that expelling a giant supplier from Medicare may go away prospects within the lurch. In April, Inspector Normal Christi Grimm defended her workplace’s work in congressional testimony but additionally asserted that its assets are insufficient. A scarcity of employees retains it from even investigating “between 300 and 400 viable felony and civil well being care circumstances” yearly, she testified, in addition to greater than half the fraud referrals from Medicare’s outdoors audit contractors.
A unique cause for going simple on huge firms was recommended by Vladeck, the previous Medicare chief. Looking for to bar a big provider for repeatedly violating probation would require exhaustive documentation and years of litigation towards squadrons of well-paid company legal professionals. Because of this, Vladeck stated, “there’s an actual incentive, from a bureaucratic perspective, to only slap their wrist, give them a kick and make them apologize. … It’s a value of doing enterprise.”
There are steps enforcers may take, however virtually by no means do, that might make firms take discover, in accordance with Jacob Elberg, a former federal prosecutor who’s now a professor at Seton Corridor Regulation College. (Amongst his publications is a 2021 regulation evaluate article titled “Well being Care Fraud Means By no means Having to Say You’re Sorry.”) Elberg’s analysis exhibits that HHS and prosecutors have a tendency to barter far smaller civil settlements than the regulation permits, they usually not often prosecute firm executives. Additionally they virtually by no means take circumstances to trial. In brief, enforcers have lengthy signaled to firms that they’re in search of a easy path to a money fee relatively than a stern punishment for a corporation and its leaders. “It’s usually a secure assumption,” Elberg stated, “that the end result might be a civil settlement at an quantity that’s tolerable.”
For its half, Congress could quickly be weighing a brand new regulation that might reshape how the oxygen trade is paid by Medicare. However relatively than clamp down on firms, the laws appears poised to do the alternative. A brand new invoice referred to as the SOAR (Supplemental Oxygen Entry Reform) Act would hand firms like Lincare a whole bunch of tens of millions extra, by elevating reimbursement charges and eliminating aggressive bidding amongst tools suppliers. Advocates say the laws will assist sufferers by making some types of oxygen extra obtainable and enhancing service. However alongside the best way it’ll reward Lincare and its rivals.
Congress has a historical past of treating oxygen firms generously. For years, lawmakers set Medicare reimbursements for oxygen tools at ranges that even HHS, in 1997, characterised as “grossly extreme.” Over the succeeding decade and a half, Lincare took benefit, snatching up a whole bunch of small suppliers and changing into the trade’s largest participant.
In 2006, below strain to cut back prices, Congress authorized steps to curb oxygen funds, together with the introduction of aggressive bidding and the 36-month cap on funds for tools leases. However even these strictures had been watered down after the trade poured cash into political contributions and lobbyists, who warned that cuts would hurt aged sufferers.
Lincare compensated by amping up methods that generated income, with little obvious regard for Medicare’s guidelines, which say it’ll reimburse prices for tools solely when there’s proof of “medical necessity.” The corporate aggressively courted medical doctors and incentivized gross sales, by bonuses the corporate paid for every new machine “setup.” In accordance with a 2016 fee schedule, reps may earn $40 for successful an order for a brand new sleep apnea machine, $100 for a brand new oxygen affected person and $200 for a noninvasive ventilator. Your complete employees of every Lincare heart may obtain a small bonus for signing up a excessive share of latest sufferers for automated month-to-month billing. Sufferers who refused auto-billing, an organization doc suggested, needs to be warned they may face “assortment exercise” and repair cutoffs. “Gross sales is our high precedence!” declared a 2020 PowerPoint to coach new hires.
As soon as it had a buyer, Lincare would pitch them extra expensive services. A technique Lincare did this was by a program referred to as CareChecks. Promoted as a “affected person monitoring” profit, CareChecks had been aimed, in accordance with an organization presentation, at producing “inner development.” If a affected person exhibited a persistent phlegmy cough, Lincare may persuade their physician to prescribe a particular vibrating vest to loosen chest mucus. Nebulizer sufferers could be candidates for house oxygen. Sufferers utilizing apnea gadgets had been potential candidates for ventilators. “We’d make sufferers assume we had been coming in clinically to evaluate them,” a former Lincare supervisor stated, “when actually it was to generate income off of them.”
Promoting substitute components may be profitable. At Lincare name facilities that offered gadgets like hoses, masks and filters for CPAP machines (used to deal with apnea), a whole bunch of commissioned brokers in Nashville, Tennessee, and Tampa, Florida, had been outfitted with packages displaying what gadgets every affected person was eligible for below Medicare. By regulation, sufferers needed to request substitute components. However steadily, that wasn’t what occurred, in accordance with Staggs, who oversaw the CPAP enterprise in 2017. He found that high salespeople, whose bonuses may whole $8,000 a month, averaged only a few minutes on the cellphone per order. That wasn’t practically sufficient time to determine what gadgets, if any, prospects really wanted. Staggs listened to recorded calls and located that, after reaching prospects, brokers usually positioned them on maintain till they hung up, then ordered them each product that Medicare would cowl.
At Lincare, outcomes had been carefully tracked and broadly shared in weekly emails displaying the very best and worst performers in every area. Notes taken by one supervisor present supervisors’ efficiency calls for throughout weekly convention calls: “Unacceptable to overlook objective … cease the reasons … If this isn’t being executed, improper [center manager] in place … When you’re not getting O2 and never getting Care Checks — you shit the mattress. Cease accepting mediocre, lazy responses ….”
“If we didn’t meet our quota, they had been going to cut our heads,” stated former Illinois gross sales rep Sandra Gauch, who labored for Lincare for 17 years earlier than becoming a member of a whistleblower go well with and quitting in 2022.
One salesperson was so afraid of lacking her quota, in accordance with Gauch, that she signed her mom up for a ventilator that she didn’t want. An organization audit in 2018 discovered that solely 10 of 56 ventilator sufferers at one heart had been utilizing them constantly. Some sufferers hadn’t used their gadgets for years. But Lincare saved billing Medicare.
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Just one factor mattered as a lot as maximizing new tools leases, in accordance with former staff and firm paperwork: minimizing prospects’ makes an attempt to finish leases. A name to retrieve respiration tools meant that it was now not wished or getting used, and Lincare was alleged to retrieve it and promptly cease billing Medicare and the affected person. The particular person’s well being might need improved. They may have gone into the hospital — or died. The explanation didn’t matter; at Lincare, “pickups” had been a black mark, deducted from staff’ efficiency scores, jeopardizing their bonuses and jobs.
Because of this, staff stated, such requests had been dreaded, delayed and deterred. Medical employees had been despatched to “reeducate” prospects to maintain utilizing their gadgets. Sufferers had been instructed they’d must signal a kind stating they had been performing “towards medical recommendation.”
Lincare managers made it clear that pickups needs to be discouraged. In a 2010 e-mail, an Ohio heart supervisor instructed subordinates: “As we now have already mentioned, completely no pick-ups/inactivation’s are to be do[ne] till I provide the inexperienced gentle. Even when they’re deceased.” In 2018, an Illinois supervisor emailed her deputies that pickups had been barred with out her specific approval: “Not even Demise that I don’t approve first.”
In February 2022, Justin Linafelter, an space supervisor in Denver, responded to the most recent company e-mail celebrating month-to-month “Achievement Rankings” for oxygen gross sales by declaring that nearly all the facilities atop the rankings had a minimum of 150 “pending pickups,” prospects who weren’t utilizing their tools however whom the corporate appeared to nonetheless be billing. “A few of these facilities are simply ignoring pickups to make this listing.”
That was solely considered one of Linafelter’s issues. In July of that yr, he emailed headquarters, saying he now not had “the assets to achieve success at my job.” The customer support employees in Denver had been minimize in half, Linafelter defined, and he’d been barred from hiring replacements. Denver’s remaining employees was “at some extent of exhaustion,” threatening affected person care.
The morning after Linafelter expressed issues to Lincare in 2022, he was summoned to a convention name with the top of HR and fired, for what he was instructed was a “company restructuring.” Linafelter, who had labored at Lincare for 9 years, stated, “I received thrown away like a bit of trash.”
Different former staff supply related accounts. In 2020, Jillian Watkins, a middle supervisor in Huntington, West Virginia, repeatedly alerted supervisors that Lincare was improperly billing for tools that sufferers weren’t utilizing. Lincare blocked her from firing a subordinate who’d falsified paperwork supporting the costs, then fired Watkins, citing “insufficient path and management.”
Then got here a sequence of turns. Pedersen, the chief compliance officer, successfully confirmed Watkins’ assertions, belatedly alerting the federal government about $486,000 in improper billings by Lincare. However Pedersen blamed the billings on Watkins, writing to Medicare that the corporate had “terminated” her to “stop [the problem] from recurring.” After Watkins sued, Pedersen admitted in a deposition that Watkins’ firing “had nothing to do with the overpayment.” In April 2024, a federal choose dominated that Watkins had introduced “a prima facie case of retaliation.” The go well with was privately settled in mediation.
Staggs, too, was ousted, he stated, after he warned high Lincare executives about improper practices on the CPAP name facilities. Staggs emailed a Lincare HR officer: “Sufferers are being shipped provides that they by no means have ordered. … That is fraud and I’ve gotten zero help or consideration to this matter once I elevate the problem to my management.” Solely months after beginning, he was fired in November 2017. He later filed a whistleblower go well with; Lincare denied wrongdoing. After the U.S. legal professional’s workplace in Nashville declined to hitch the case in 2022, Staggs withdrew the motion.
Staggs’ account of improper billings matches an trade sample that seems to proceed to at the present time. In a 2018 report, HHS’ inspector common estimated that Medicare had paid greater than $631 million in improper claims for CPAP and different provides over a two-year interval. One other HHS evaluation recognized an extra $566 million in potential overpayments for apnea gadgets.
The company’s oversight “was not enough to make sure that suppliers complied with Medicare necessities,” the 2018 report concluded. Six years later, HHS has not taken public motion towards Lincare referring to CPAPs.
Right this moment, fraudulent billing amongst Medicare tools suppliers stays a “main concern,” in accordance with the inspector common. The company says it continues to evaluate the problem.
Doris Burke contributed analysis.