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Home Health & Hospice Week

Fraud & Abuse:

What Do You Think? Is There Really More Health Care Fraud and Abuse These Days?

Published on Tue Oct 12, 2010

The answer may surprise you. A recent FBI bust of a health care fraud ring run by organized crime elements has providers asking whether home care may have become a lucrative new stomping ground for the Mob. Attorney Robert Markette Jr. says he has, in fact, been claiming for the past couple of years that health care fraud perpetrated by organized crime is on the rise. "What we're seeing in Houston, Miami, and Louisiana is outright criminal conduct where witnesses, etc., are ending up dead," says Markette, with Gilliland & Markette in Indianapolis. "It's like 1920 Mafia stuff." In the recent bust, individuals allegedly related to an Armenian-American crime syndicate stole the identities of doctors and thousands of Medicare beneficiaries and operated at least 118 different  phony physician clinics in 25 states (see Eli's HCW, Vol. XIX, No. 37, p. 296 for more details). Seventy-three defendants were charged in indictments. [...]
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