Jeanne A. Markey

Jeanne A. Markey is of counsel at Cohen Milstein and a member of the Whistleblower/False Claims Act practice. She has successfully represented whistleblowers in federal and state cases across the country in some of highest-profile qui tam litigation in the healthcare, defense, financial services, and education industries. She has also represented whistleblower clients in the public housing sector, in S.E.C. related matters, and in matters involving complex financial instruments.

Representative settled cases include:

• United States of America et al., ex rel. Lauren Kieff, v. Wyeth: Ms. Markey was co-lead counsel in this False Claims Act whistleblower case against pharmaceutical giant Wyeth (subsequently acquired by Pfizer), in which the whistleblowers alleged that Wyeth defrauded Medicaid, the joint federal/state healthcare program for the poor, when it reported falsely inflated prices for its acid suppression drug Protonix from 2001 through 2006 for Medicaid rebate purposes.  Weeks before trial, in February 2016, in one of the largest qui tam settlements in U.S. history, Wyeth agreed to pay $784.6 million to the U.S. government and the over 35 intervening states.
• United States et al. ex relators v. Southern SNF Management, Inc. and Rehab Services in Motion, LLC:  Ms. Markey was lead counsel in this False Claims Act case in which three whistleblowers employed by a chain of skilled nursing facilities located in Florida and Alabama alleged that the chain was engaged in a multi-year scheme of inflating the facilities’ Medicare collections by assigning Medicare patients to levels of therapy, (often referred to as “RUG” levels), higher than what was medically reasonable and necessary for that patient. In July 2018 this case settled for $10 million.
• Ven-A-Care Whistleblower Litigation: Ms. Markey was involved in a series of Ven-A-Care whistleblower cases which pertained to the inflated reimbursement amounts drug companies were causing Medicare and Medicaid to pay for prescription drugs by reporting inflated wholesale prices to the government. These large, highly-successful groundbreaking cases helped to pave the way for a wide range of subsequent False Claims Act cases in the realm of healthcare and directed at drug companies in particular. 

In 2016, Ms. Markey was recognized as one of the top 25 women lawyers in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania by The Legal Intelligencer. In 2018, she, an alumna of Cornell University Law School, was invited to become a member of The President’s Council of Cornell Women.

She is also an active member of Taxpayers Against Fraud, a nonprofit, public interest organization dedicated to combating fraud against the Federal Government through the promotion and use of the Federal False Claims Act and its Qui Tam provisions, and the Association of qui tam attorneys.

She frequently speaks about developments in the qui tam field and has co-authored several articles about topics including statistical sampling and representing whistleblowers in cases involving issues of medical necessity.

Ms. Markey received her B.A. (cum laude) from Colgate University and her J.D. from Cornell University Law School.