Independent profile — not affiliated with Cleveland Clinic
Cleveland Clinic
Cleveland Clinic is a large nonprofit academic medical center founded in 1921 in Cleveland, Ohio, now operating 23 hospitals and about 300 outpatient locations across Ohio, Florida, and abroad, with system-wide operating revenue of $18.3 billion. It carries a BBB A+ rating and accreditation since 1996, but the letter grade reflects BBB's process criteria, not patient satisfaction: BBB separately logs 243 complaints in the last 3 years -- the large majority over billing -- against a 1.32-out-of-5 average across 41 customer reviews. Search interest in "Cleveland Clinic scam" traces mainly to two things: caller-ID-spoofed robocalls impersonating the Clinic (unrelated third-party fraud, not the Clinic's own conduct) and a genuine billing class action alleging deceptive practices. The Clinic and its subsidiary Akron General have paid a combined $28.9 million to resolve two separate DOJ False Claims Act matters (2021, 2024) over billing/grant-compliance issues, and in 2026 reached a DOJ settlement regarding billing codes used for pediatric gender-affirming care, agreeing to a long-term halt on the practice for minors and funding for detransition-related care -- a politically significant, recent development reported here as settlement terms only, without characterizing the underlying merits.
Complaints & Reviews on USAComplaints
USAComplaints currently maintains 5 historical complaints about Cleveland Clinic, published between 2008 and 2013. No approved complaints have been published on this site during the last three years. For a current reputation snapshot, see the independent sources below.
- The company gives false information. I cross referenced a doctor name at the Cleveland Clinic in reference to an article in their book. The doctor was not at the Cleveland Clinic nor could I find him
- Mr. Richard Whitehouse allow dysfunctional dealings of the State Medical Board taking women MD licenses for not going along with Dr. Nice care & behaviors - where he can't cast and can't call the Cleveland Clinic as he has
- Cleveland Clinic Ob-Gyn Department needs to find some other alternative for male clerkship students to get Honors than by doing pelvics on women MDs at Beachwood -? There's always a chance that one woman MD will go for it?
- Cleveland Clinic Foundation will cover up that a woman physician in the class behind her in Medical School has a bone condition so that a classmate - Carla O'Day MD - can expedite the loss of medical license of that women physic
- Dr. Eric Weiss At Cleveland Clinic do not see this doctor he is an absolute jerk!
Complaint Themes
Independent Sources
Shown for context — not merged with USAComplaints' own numbers.
Contacts
- Office of Patient Experience / Ombudsman: 216-444-2544
- Official website: https://my.clevelandclinic.org
Locations
| Type | Address |
|---|---|
| Headquarters | 9500 Euclid Ave Cleveland OH 44195 |
What Cleveland Clinic Is
Cleveland Clinic is a nonprofit academic medical center founded February 5, 1921 by four physicians -- George W. Crile, Frank E. Bunts, William E. Lower, and John Phillips -- who had served together in a US Army medical unit during World War I and adopted a group-practice model from military medicine. It is a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit (EIN 34-0714585). Today the system operates 23 hospitals and roughly 300 outpatient locations across Northeast Ohio, Florida, London, Las Vegas, Toronto, and Abu Dhabi, with about 83,000 employees (including 6,600 physicians and scientists), treating 3.6 million unique patients and handling 15.9 million visits annually. System-wide operating revenue was reported at $18.3 billion with a 5.0% operating margin. On its own Form 990 for fiscal year 2024, the parent Cleveland Clinic Foundation entity reported total revenue of $9,680,031,802, total expenses of $9,434,081,551, and net assets of $8,783,896,513 -- a narrower figure than the system-wide total because it covers only the parent nonprofit, not all subsidiary/affiliate entities. CEO Dr. Tom (Tomislav) Mihaljevic's reported total compensation for FY2024 was approximately $9.7 million. Cleveland Clinic has ranked in US News & World Report's Honor Roll of best hospitals for 35 consecutive years as of the 2025-2026 rankings.
Is Cleveland Clinic Legitimate?
Cleveland Clinic is a large, real, internationally recognized nonprofit hospital system -- not a scam in any conventional sense. It carries a BBB A+ rating and has been BBB accredited since December 2, 1996. That letter grade, however, reflects BBB's own process-based criteria (transparency, complaint responsiveness), not patient satisfaction: separately, BBB logs 243 complaints in the last 3 years (80 closed in the last 12 months, the large majority -- 189 of 243 -- categorized as Billing Issues) against a 1.32-out-of-5 average across 41 customer reviews, a stark gap between the letter grade and the review score worth understanding as two different signals.
Search interest in "Cleveland Clinic scam" appears to come from two distinct sources. First, criminals have used caller-ID spoofing to impersonate Cleveland Clinic in robocalls -- one documented case involved a North Royalton, Ohio resident receiving a call, days after a real procedure, from a spoofed number matching the Clinic's actual line, requesting personal information; this is third-party fraud exploiting the Clinic's name, not misconduct by the Clinic itself. Second, and more substantively, the billing-complaint pattern above and a proposed (not yet confirmed as certified) billing-practices class action (see the related case entry) give the word "scam" some grounding in genuine, unresolved consumer disputes over how bills and collections are handled -- a different and more legitimate category of concern than the impersonation calls.
Beyond billing, Cleveland Clinic and its owned subsidiary Akron General have agreed to pay a combined $28.9 million to resolve two separate False Claims Act matters (2021 and 2024) -- neither involving an admission of liability -- and in June 2026 reached a further settlement with the US and the State of Ohio specifically regarding billing codes used in pediatric gender-affirming care, a recent and politically contested matter reported in the related case entry strictly by its settlement terms. Separately, in September 2023, US Senator Bill Cassidy opened a Senate HELP Committee inquiry into Cleveland Clinic's use of the federal 340B drug-discount program, after the Clinic reportedly received $933.7 million in 340B benefit from 2020-2023 while stating it does not pass those drug discounts directly to patients.
What Complainants Allege
The dominant complaint category by far is billing: patients describe not being offered a required cost estimate before a procedure, payments applied to the wrong account or service, being denied a receipt for a payment already made, and debts referred to collections that patients dispute as inflated or already paid -- the same pattern underlying the active Van Brakle billing class action described above. A smaller share of complaints concern customer service (difficulty reaching the right department, unreturned calls) and service/repair-style disputes over specific care episodes. Cleveland Clinic's own Office of Patient Experience (Ombudsman) exists specifically to handle care-related grievances that can't be resolved directly with a department, though it explicitly does not handle billing, scheduling, or medical-records disputes, which are routed to separate departments.
If You Have a Billing Dispute or Suspect an Impersonation Call
- Before any procedure, ask in writing for a cost estimate and confirm what your insurance is expected to cover -- Ohio and federal No Surprises Act rules may entitle you to this.
- Keep your own record of every payment (date, amount, method, confirmation number) in case a payment is later misapplied or disputed.
- If you receive a call claiming to be from Cleveland Clinic asking for personal or financial information you didn't initiate, hang up and call the Clinic back directly using the number on your own paperwork or their official website -- caller ID can be spoofed.
- For a care-related concern that your department hasn't resolved, contact the Office of Patient Experience (Ombudsman) at 216-444-2544 or 800-223-2273 ext. 42544.
- For billing disputes specifically, contact the billing department directly in writing, and if unresolved, you can file a complaint with the Better Business Bureau or the Ohio Attorney General's consumer-protection office.
Court & Public Records
| Case | Authority | Dates | Type | Outcome | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| United States/HHS-OIG Settlement Agreement with Cleveland Clinic Foundation (False Claims Act allegations — undisclosed foreign research funding) | U.S. Attorney's Office, Northern District of Ohio (civil settlement) | — | Settled | Settled Cleveland Clinic Foundation paid $7,600,000 to resolve allegations of false statements to the National Institutes of Health regarding three federal grants -- specifically, that a principal investigator concealed concurrent foreign funding, along with alleged violations of NIH data-security/password policy. No admission of liability; the Clinic's federal grants were placed under Specific Award Conditions for one year (October 2024-September 2025). | Source |
| United States ex rel. Brouse v. Akron General Health System (owned by Cleveland Clinic Foundation) | Qui tam False Claims Act settlement (federal) | — | Settled | Settled Akron General Health System (acquired by Cleveland Clinic Foundation in late 2015) agreed to pay $21.3 million to resolve allegations -- not an admission of liability -- that it paid referring physicians above fair market value in violation of the Anti-Kickback Statute and Stark Law (2010-2016), then billed Medicare for the resulting referrals. Whistleblower Beverly Brouse, a former Akron General internal-audit director, brought the underlying qui tam action and received a share of the recovery. Cleveland Clinic self-disclosed the issue to regulators after acquiring Akron General and cooperated with the investigation. | Source |
| United States/State of Ohio Settlement Agreement with Cleveland Clinic Foundation (billing codes for pediatric gender-affirming care) | US Department of Justice and Ohio Attorney General (civil settlement) | — | Settled | Settled Arising from an ongoing national DOJ investigation into billing practices (not confirmed as a Cleveland-Clinic-specific investigation dating to 2025), Cleveland Clinic agreed to a $308,000 payment ($300,000 to the United States, $8,000 to the State of Ohio) to resolve allegations of incorrect diagnostic billing codes submitted to insurers and Ohio Medicaid. Separately, as part of the same agreement, the Clinic committed to fund an estimated $2 million in medical-care costs for patients who have detransitioned (this is a cost commitment under the settlement, not an additional penalty), and agreed to a long-term (reported as decades-long) halt on providing puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones to minors for gender dysphoria. Cleveland Clinic disputes the underlying allegations; the settlement includes no determination of liability. This is a recent and politically significant matter -- reported here strictly as the settlement's stated terms, not as a characterization of the underlying medical or legal merits. | Source |
| Van Brakle v. The Cleveland Clinic Foundation Docket CV-20-936348 | Cuyahoga County Court of Common Pleas, Ohio (Judge John P. O'Donnell) | — | Filed | Filed — no final outcome recorded Proposed (putative, not yet certified) class action alleging deceptive billing practices under the Ohio Consumer Sales Practices Act -- including failure to disclose the right to a cost estimate, failure to provide a receipt for a payment, misapplied payments, and referral of an allegedly overinflated debt to collections. Judge John P. O'Donnell denied Cleveland Clinic's motion to dismiss on January 14, 2021, allowing the case to proceed. Its current docket status (including whether a class was ever certified) could not be independently confirmed in this research pass -- readers should check the live Cuyahoga County docket for the current disposition. | Source |
| Di v. Cleveland Clinic Foundation (2016-Ohio-686) | Cuyahoga County Court of Common Pleas, Ohio (No. CV-13-806377); appealed to the Eighth District Court of Appeals (No. 101760) | — | Appeal decided | Appeal decided — see outcome Medical malpractice trial-court jury verdict of approximately $7.7 million (one source cites $7,625,000), arising from eye surgery the plaintiff -- himself a surgeon -- alleged damaged his iris/pupil and ended his surgical career; the award largely reflected lost future earnings. This was not the case's final outcome: the trial court had already reduced part of the non-economic damages, and on February 25, 2016 the Eighth District Court of Appeals affirmed in part, reversed in part, and remanded the case, requiring further application of Ohio's statutory damages cap. The $7.7 million figure should not be reported as a final, collected judgment amount. | Source |
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Cleveland Clinic a scam?
No -- it's a large, real, internationally recognized nonprofit hospital system. "Scam" search interest mostly traces to two separate things: criminals spoofing Cleveland Clinic's caller ID in impersonation robocalls (not the Clinic's own conduct), and genuine, documented billing complaints/litigation, which are a real but different category of concern.
Has Cleveland Clinic had legal or regulatory settlements?
Yes. Cleveland Clinic agreed to pay $7.6 million in 2024 to resolve False Claims Act allegations over undisclosed foreign research funding, and its subsidiary Akron General agreed to pay $21.3 million in 2021 over physician-referral compensation issues. In June 2026 the Clinic reached a further settlement with the US and Ohio ($308,000, plus an estimated $2 million cost commitment for related patient care) regarding billing codes for pediatric gender-affirming care, without admitting liability.
How do I file a complaint about my care at Cleveland Clinic?
For care-related concerns not resolved directly with your department, contact the Office of Patient Experience (Ombudsman) at 216-444-2544 or 800-223-2273 ext. 42544 ([email protected]). Billing, scheduling, and medical-records issues are handled by separate departments -- the Ombudsman office explicitly does not cover those.