Attorneys for 366 former patients of Tenet Healthcare Corp.'s hospital in Redding sued the company and eight doctors Friday, accusing them of performing unnecessary heart surgeries to boost profit.
The lawsuit claims that Redding Medical Center's chief cardiologist and its top cardiac surgeon -- Chae Hyun Moon and Fidel Realyvasquez -- joined a half-dozen associates in defrauding people who needlessly went under the knife.
Moon and Realyvasquez are defendants in more than 100 other lawsuits, filed after federal investigators raided Redding Medical last fall and accused the two of performing needless procedures on healthy patients.
The suit in Shasta County Superior Court accuses Tenet, its hospital and the doctors of fraud, negligence, battery and elder abuse.
Tenet officials said they could not comment because they had not seen the complaint, which runs 247 pages.
It was filed a week after Santa Barbara-based Tenet agreed to pay $54 million to resolve government allegations of fraud at Redding Medical.
The settlement, in which Tenet admitted no wrongdoing, ended the government's criminal and civil probes into the company and its Redding hospital, although prosecutors are investigating individuals involved in the alleged fraud.
Of the 366 former patients, 51 are deceased. The suit attributes some of their deaths specifically to procedures performed by doctors at Redding Medical.
The defendants "have caused death and devastation to the families of these victims," said Russ Reiner, one of the attorneys for the plaintiffs.
Among them is country music legend Merle Haggard, who in 1997 had a pair of heart stents put in by Moon. In a November interview with The Times, Haggard, 66, said he underwent the treatment at Moon's behest and later suspected he didn't need the operation.
Reiner said it took months to interview patients and their families, compile their medical records and in some cases send them for independent reviews to doctors at other institutions, including Stanford University.
The lawsuit claims that some doctors at Redding Medical warned hospital administrators in 1997 that they believed some heart surgeries performed at the facility weren't medically necessary. Those doctors called for an audit of heart procedures, the suit said, but their concerns were ignored while the pace of cardiac procedures at the hospital accelerated.
