Posted on 01/29/2012 2:02:03 AM PST by plenipotentiary
Debating in Tampa, Florida in late-January, while falsely characterizing Newt Gingrichs income from his government consulting work, Mitt Romney denied that Bain did any work with the government like Medicaid and Medicare. Now we learn that Bain, under Romneys supervision, purchased and ran the Damon Corporation, who pled guilty to Federal conspiracy charges as a result of tens of millions of dollars in systemic Medicare fraud committed under Romneys and Bains control. Damon was fined over $119-million which was, at the time, the largest criminal healthcare fine in Massachusetts history and Mr. Romneys participation was characterized in 1996 by Corporate Crime Reporter thusly: As manager and board member of Damon Corp, Mitt Romney sits at the center of one of the top 15 corporate crimes of the 1990s. Watch the substantiated mini-documentary, BLOOD MONEY: MITT ROMNEYS MEDICARE SCANDAL, to learn the truth about Mitt Romney
Most of the time, I think directors should know more about what's going on than they know or than they claim to know. Then again, I've been involved in government investigations where the government's discovery turned up *audiotapes* of the chairman of the board involved in the destruction of troublesome documents. This, after depositions in which the chairman claimed no knowledge of what the officers and executives had been doing.
This company lost money for three years. Then it's making money. And there has to be a sudden increase in tests performed. If the reports seen by the board are detailed, then the number of tests performed grows disproportionately to the number of encounters. Even patients who were having one test performed are now having four tests performed, at a minimum, for those patients for whom Damon was ordering the automatic three-panel tests (without physicians' orders).
So it all depends on what the board saw. If the board saw too much, then all of the board knew too much and should have seen that something improper was going on. If the board saw too little, then the board should have asked "why this turnaround?" And it's difficult for the officers to answer that in a manner that doesn't say "ummm, fraud?" to any directors with clinical laboratory experience. You would like to assume at least one member of that board had relevant experience with the industry, some knowledge of the market, some background to permit him or her to make or approve grand policies.
Nothing I've seen implicates Romney. But this isn't my first rodeo. This is what I do. If the board of Damon didn't know, it was incompetent, or the officers and executives were geniuses in disguising it. And even then, some audit, should have shown it.
The Office of Inspector General of the Department of Health and Human Services didn't publish a proposed compliance plan for clinical laboratories until December 18, 1998. Damon, Quest, and the others were the reason the OIG did that.
“You don’t pick them. They pick you”
W get more solicitations from those bloodsuckers in a week than we get from web builders in a month. You don’t get money from a VC, you get an angry, insatiable partner.
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