The Trump administration has announced charges against 455 people, including 90 doctors and other healthcare professionals, for their alleged participation in healthcare fraud and opioid abuse schemes. The defendants were involved in $6.5 billion worth of fraud that involved false claims and resulted in significant harm to patients.
Details of the Charges
The Justice Department highlighted one defendant who allegedly rubber-stamped a student’s cardiovascular test as normal without alerting the family that his heart was enlarged. The 18-year-old college basketball player, Kaiden Francis, died weeks later during a workout.
A record 45 states and territories participated in this year’s National Health Care Fraud Takedown. The Trump administration has been focused on healthcare fraud, with Dr. Mehmet Oz, who runs the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, leading the effort to stop payments for fraudulent claims before they are made.
The cases included fraudulent wound care claims, which resulted in $2 billion in Medicare payments to one Arizona company and another $906 million scheme in Texas. In another case, one California hospice owner allegedly paid a funeral home employee for information about the recently deceased to fraudulently bill Medicare for a few days of hospice services.
Original reporting: El Paso News (HLL/CB) — read the source article.
