Posted on 06/24/2009 4:03:10 PM PDT by Larry381
WASHINGTON—Fifty-three people have been indicted for schemes to submit more than $50 million in false Medicare claims in the continuing operation of the Medicare Fraud Strike Force in Detroit, Attorney General Eric Holder, Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and FBI Director Robert Mueller announced today. The Strike Force in Detroit is the third phase of a targeted criminal, civil and administrative effort against individuals and health care companies that fraudulently bill the Medicare program.
While the indictments were returned by a grand jury in Detroit, individuals were arrested today in Detroit, Miami, and Denver as a result of phase three operations of the Strike Force. The joint DOJ-HHS Medicare Fraud Strike Force is a multi-agency team of federal, state and local investigators designed to combat Medicare fraud through the use of Medicare data analysis techniques and an increased focus on community policing.
“As demonstrated by today’s charges and arrests, we will strike back against those whose fraudulent schemes not only undermine a program upon which 45 million aged and disabled Americans depend, but which also contribute directly to rising health care costs that all Americans must bear,” said Attorney General Holder. “The vast majority of doctors, patients, and medical companies do the right thing and work with the Medicare program to provide access to medical services. To those who work diligently and ethically to provide medical care through the Medicare program, we will work with you to root out the few who corrupt the system and taint the good reputations of health professionals everywhere.”
“The Obama Administration is committed to turning up the heat on Medicare fraud and employing all the weapons in the federal government’s arsenal to target those who are defrauding the American taxpayer,” said HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. “Thanks to cooperation from across the government and some of the best law enforcement professionals in the country, today we were able to save millions of dollars from being lost to criminals and send a powerful message to those who seek to defraud the system, that we are coming after them. But our joint efforts on HEAT don’t just stop at the jailhouse door. Our Medicare program is working closely in partnership with our own and other law enforcement operations to prevent fraud from happening in the first place. Every dollar we can save by stopping fraud can be used to strengthen the long-term fiscal health of Medicare, bring down costs and deliver better service to Medicare beneficiaries.”
The Strike Force operations in Detroit are part of the Health Care Fraud Prevention & Enforcement Action Team (HEAT), a renewed effort announced in May 2009 between the Department of Justice and HHS to focus their joint efforts to prevent fraud and enforce current anti-fraud laws around the country. The HEAT taskforce, co-chaired by Deputy Attorney General David Ogden and Deputy Secretary Bill Corr, is made up of top-level law enforcement agents, prosecutors and staff from both Departments and their operating divisions. In the May 2009 announcement, Attorney General Holder and Secretary Sebelius announced the expansion of the Strike Force into Detroit and Houston to build upon existing partnerships between the agencies in a heightened effort to reduce fraud and recover taxpayer dollars.
Today, federal agents from the FBI and the HHS Office of Inspector General (HHS-OIG) began executing arrest warrants in Detroit, Miami, and Denver as part of a concentrated effort to address fraud in the metro-Detroit area. Charges were unsealed today against 53 individuals who are accused of various Medicare fraud offenses, including conspiracy to defraud the Medicare program, criminal false claims and violations of the anti-kickback statutes. The Strike Force operations in Detroit have identified two primary areas—infusion therapy and physical/occupational therapy providers—in which schemes were allegedly orchestrated to defraud the Medicare program.
According to the indictments, the defendants charged today participated in schemes to submit claims to Medicare for treatments that were in fact medically unnecessary and oftentimes, never provided. In many cases, indictments allege that beneficiaries accepted cash kickbacks in return for allowing providers to submit forms saying they had received the unnecessary and not provided treatments. Collectively, the physicians, medical assistants, patients, company owners and executives charged in the indictments are accused of conspiring to submit more than $50 million in false claims to the Medicare program.
“We will continue to work together in the months to come to identify and stop those who would line their own pockets with taxpayer money—those who seek to benefit at the expense of our health care system, our economy and our collective well-being,” said FBI Director Mueller.
“Today’s landmark series of arrests in Detroit and across the country demonstrates that health care fraud can happen anywhere in America,” said Daniel R. Levinson, Inspector General of the Department of Health & Human Services. “We will continue to detect and respond rapidly to emerging fraud schemes to protect our federal health care programs and conserve scarce health care dollars so critically needed for the care of our beneficiaries.”
The work of the Detroit Strike Force is another important step in the multi-phase enforcement and regulatory HEAT initiative designed to reduce the potential for Medicare and Medicaid fraud. Since its inception in March 2007 with phase one in South Florida and expansion to phase two in Los Angeles in May 2008, the Strike Force has obtained indictments of more than 250 individuals and organizations that collectively have billed the Medicare program for more than $600 million. In addition, HHS’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, working in conjunction with the HHS-OIG, is taking steps to increase accountability and decrease the presence of fraudulent providers.
Each of the three Detroit Strike Force teams is led by a federal prosecutor supervised by the Justice Department’s Criminal Division’s Fraud Section in Washington, D.C., and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Michigan. Each team has four to six agents, with at least one agent from the FBI and HHS-OIG.
The cases are being prosecuted by attorneys from the Fraud Section in the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, including Deputy Chief Kirk Ogrosky and Trial Attorneys John K. Neal and Benjamin D. Singer as well Special Assistant U.S. Attorney Thomas W. Beimers in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Michigan, on detail from HHS-OIG.
Wait till we have Nationalized Health Care.....only the fraudsters will have healthcare....
Names and pictures please.
Famous last words by drunks in Vegas...”Hell, it can’t get any worse...let’s double down!!!”
It is fraud when someone else does it it’s stimulous when the criminals in congress and this administration do it. How is one criminal enterprise guilty and the other isn’t?
If this was real, I'd be impressed - but corruption follows federal money. The system calls out to shysters - "come and get it - we're not paying attention..."
Let me guess, 53 people used dead people to increase votes, defraud Medicare, and collect SSI to boot.
Yeah, turn our free medical industry over to the government to cut costs and streamline.
Lest we forget the minimum 10% cut off the top for political favor.
This is Bush’s fault. Leave those Detroit fraudsters alone. They’ll be needed during the next federal election! Can’t wait to see the vote fraud investigations . . .
Moving to Texas in hope that Texas secedes may become the only hope.
Now what are they going to do to pay the rent?
Went to the Miami Herald website, apparently when the feds shut down some of the operation in Miami, the crooks moved the operation to Detroit. Looks like most of the perps are Chicanohispanilatino, several from Cuba.
To anyone interested in seeing story after story like this: Click on the keyword “medicarefraud” above. It’s unbelievable.
I thought I saw an Arab name or two in there, also.
“You DO realized those were the last 53 people in Detroit with some sort of real income, right?”
Spend some time in damn near ANY Democrat-run inner-city, and you’ll find that almost the ENTIRE ECONOMY is running off of money from:
1) ILLEGAL DRUGS
2) Welfare Fraud
3) Welfare
4) Medicare
5) Medicare Fraud
6) Political Corruption and Favor-buying
It’s the dirty little secret that NO ONE in the Mainstream MEdia is willing to talk about, out of fear of being called “RACIST!!”, and having ACORN show up at the door.
You will OCCASIONALLY see it get mentioned in the local alternative papers, but few ever see it.
These outfits that ship diabetes testing devices and testing strips also need to be on the fraud-radar screen. Sure wish the Inspector General had teeth or even a nose to sniff the stinkers out of the wood pile.
Well, that was Detroit. What if the scamsters were well-connected denizens of Chicago?
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2278724/posts
Eight Indicted in $100 Million Multi-State Health Care Fraud Scheme
$100 Million + $50 Million= $150 million in 2 stories.
I can tell you from experience, that the liberal boards of directors running these quack hospitals are some of the most slimey, crooked bastards that have ever crawled on Michigan soil.
I’d go for hanging these slimeballs.
The Medicare money is gone and unlikely to be recovered. The government (us) will spend or have spent more money to investigate and prosecute these people. Then the government (us) will probably provide room, board, and medical care (federal prison) for them for possibly the next 10 to 20 years.
Government (us) health care costs the government (us) much more than the Medicare payments.
That’s less than a million apiece. Geez. Get off their backs.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.