Insurance: California is venue for largest yet medicare fraud
California's Medi-Cal is under attack from all directions. California has no money. Its governor has been issuing IOUs that the banks are saying they don't want to take. And the state-run medical insurance scheme has suffered its largest yet healthcare fraud, says the US Attorney Thomas O'Brien.
20 people have been arrested - but as yet charges have not been laid.
Not that stops the US Attorney's Office from giving the impression that it's all done and dusted. "The people associated with this fraud ring not only cheated taxpayers, they endangered the lives of young people they promised to protect and care for," he said.
Documents filed at Court say that a registered nurse, Priscilla Villabroza was the organizer of the gang. She, it is said, ran a company called Medcare Plus Home Health Providers. She pleaded guilty last year to five counts of fraud. The documents go on to say that she and others emplyed others to provide care to disabled Medi-Cal benefit recipients under a special scheme called "Early and Periodic Screening, Diagnosis, and Treatment (EPSDT) Supplemental Services."
But, the papers say, the people she hired, represented and billed as qualified and licensed carers were in fact unqualified and unlicensed. Some, it is alleged had no training and others had no experience or - if some of the allegations are true - no common sense or ability to help patients at all.
California's Attorney-General Edmund G. Brown Jr., who has taken the Governor to Court to prevent him and his officers working compulsory short time to save money for the poverty stricken state says "at a time of budgetary crisis, they cheated California's welfare system and pocketed millions of dollars in unauthorized state reimbursements."
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