Bringing about a higher level of transparency and accountability in provincial and federal governments to help protect taxpayers from abuse
(KMSP) – The Minnesota Attorney General’s office charged seven women with nine counts of theft and racketeering after they allegedly stole about $7.5 million in Medicaid funding.
According to court documents, the alleged ringleader, Lillian Richardson, enlisted family and friends to set up home health care businesses in Minnesota, and collect money for services never rendered.
Read more at fox9.com
It started with a letter from US Senator Charles Grassley.
In December 2009, the Iowa Republican demanded to know how a Miami psychiatrist was writing more than 96,000 prescriptions for Medicaid patients. It was nearly twice the number of the second highest prescriber in Florida.
The psychiatrist, Dr. Fernando Mendez-Villamil, responded with a tartly worded message of his own. “I never thought I would be faulted for working hard or for being very organized and efficient,” he wrote the senator.
Health-care fraud costs the US government and insurance companies some $100 billion a year in overcharges and other rip offs, according to experts. It is a perpetual drain on the nation’s wealth, undercutting the ability to provide quality healthcare to those most in need.
read more at yahoo.com
Attorney General Doug Peterson announced today that a judge has ordered a Chadron-area mental health therapist to pay more than $300,000 to the state due to her improper billing practices.
Dawes County District Judge Travis O’Gorman ordered Anna Young to pay $308,866.80 after an investigation by the Attorney General’s Medicaid Fraud and Patient Abuse Unit found that she had billed Nebraska Medicaid $102,955.60 for mental health services. Young admitted that she knowingly failed to maintain documentation to support the submission of the claims, as required by law. She was ordered to repay triple the amount that she billed to Medicaid, per the Nebraska False Medicaid Claims Act.
read more at The Hemingford Ledger
BOISE — A Fruitland woman will serve five years in prison for her role in health-care fraud and aggravated identity theft.
Cherie R. Dillon, 62, of Fruitland, was sentenced Wednesday to five years in prison to be followed by three years of supervised release for health-care fraud and aggravated identity theft, Acting U.S. Attorney Rafael Gonzalez announced in a news release.
Read more at argusobserver.com
The state of Ohio is taking five major opioid manufacturers to task—for their alleged role in escalating the epidemic of opioid addiction and overdose.
The companies named in the lawsuit, filed Wednesday (May 31), are Purdue Pharma, Janssen Pharmaceuticals (a unit of Johnson & Johnson), a unit of Endo International Plc, Cephalon (a unit of Teva Pharmaceutical Industries), and Allergan Plc.
Attorney General Mike DeWine, who filed the lawsuit in Ross County, said the bulk of the opioid crisis can be blamed on the pharmaceutical companies, who are accused of marketing and promoting powerful opioid meds like OxyContin and Percocet, in addition to “overstating their benefits and trivializing their potential addictive qualities,” according to Reuters.
Read more at thefix.com