Legal challenges take aim at victim referral services such as 1-800-Ask-Gary

It might be hard for Gary Kompothecras to top 2010, when his representatives secured naming rights to Tampa's big outdoor concert arena — the 1-800-Ask-Gary Amphitheater.

Still, 2012 promises to be a banner year for Kompothecras, too.

The Florida Bar, a state legislator from St. Petersburg and Florida Chief Financial Officer Jeff Atwater are taking aim at Kompothecras' 1-800-Ask-Gary hot line and similar lawyer and medical referral services.

Whether he's able to fend off these attacks on his business model makes Kompothecras a businessman to watch in 2012.

Kompothecras wouldn't grant The Tampa Tribune an interview for this article. But his company's corporate counsel, Greg Zitani, suggested that insurance companies are behind the attacks on companies such as his.

"Insurance companies don't like health care organizations that accurately diagnose a patient's injuries following an accident because it leads to higher claims," Zitani said in an emailed statement.

"They should be focused on the real problems — reducing accidents and reducing fraud in the accident-related health care industry," he said.

Kompothecras is the Gary behind 1-800-Ask-Gary and its affiliated chain of auto accident clinics, Physicians Group of Sarasota. Today, Physicians Group and a related clinic chain operate at least 50 clinics and health care facilities in Florida, Minnesota and Kentucky.

The Ask Gary legal and medical hot line refers callers to dozens of lawyers and to Physician Group's clinics for treatment, often billing the insurer who carries the patient's personal injury protection, or PIP.

This year may be Physicians Group's toughest since 2003, when Kompothecras founded its predecessor company, 1st Health.

A Florida Bar committee is proposing new regulations to prevent abuses by lawyer referral services.

For example, people injured in a car crash sometimes complain they are met at a health care center by a lawyer they never contacted. One new Bar regulation would ensure that accident victims initiate contact with lawyers.

Grier Wells, a Jacksonville lawyer leading the Bar committee, said he believes concern specifically about 1-800-Ask-Gary helped spur the Bar's probe. The committee will recommend new regulations to the Bar's governing board in the spring, Wells said.

"The 1-800-Ask-Gary billboards and television ads and marquees on buses have been a driving force into the Bar's inquiry into lawyer referral services," Wells said.

Florida CFO Atwater gave the Bar an assist in November when he asked it to ban lawyer referral services. His letter to the Bar mentioned the "incestuous interactions" between lawyers and health care providers who belong to the referral services.

A second challenge may come this month in Tallahassee.

A bill by state Rep. Rick Kriseman, a St. Petersburg Democrat, would give accident hot line callers more choices in health care providers. Kriseman's bill would require such hot lines to refer patients to nonaffiliated clinics, as well.

"They shouldn't be able to refer to themselves as a referral service if they're only sending you to one clinic," Kriseman said Friday. "That's just a marketing arm for your facility."

Kriseman said Kompothecras hasn't pushed back so far, but he wonders whether the Sarasota businessman will try to influence the Legislature's leadership this year.

State legislators likely will debate the broader issue of no-fault insurance — many accident clinics' chief source of revenue — in January.

Atwater gave a speech in St. Petersburg last summer decrying how staged auto accidents and insurance fraud boost insurance rates.

He cited data from the Office of Insurance Regulation saying a 40-year-old woman in Tampa would have paid about $330 for PIP insurance in 2008. She would pay about $580 for PIP this year, those figures show.

No one has singled out 1-800-Ask-Gary or Physicians Group as chief culprits. But Wells, the Bar committee head, said overuse of PIP insurance is what drives accident clinics' profits.

For its part, Kompothecras' Physicians Group says it is not the bad actor its opponents portray. The company does not permit attorneys to dictate patients' medical treatment, and it doesn't treat patients for nonexistent injuries.

"Physicians Group and its associated companies are being attacked by those who wish to politicize the issue of Personal Injury Protection insurance reform," Zitani said.