U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland speaking on June 22, 2023 in Washington, DC.
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The Ministry of Justice announced Wednesday that it recently charged 78 people $2.5 billion in separate health care fraud and opioid abuse schemes.
The defendants allegedly defrauded programs to care for the elderly and disabled, and in some cases used ill-gotten gains to purchase exotic cars, jewelry and yachts, the Justice Department said.
The defendants include 11 defendants accused of creating $2 billion price of false claims via telemedicine, in addition to 10 defendants accused of false claims involving pharmaceuticals.
In total, prosecutors filed charges against people in 16 states in cases that were filed or opened in the past two weeks as a part of a coordinated trial.
The defendants include “doctors and other licensed medical professionals who were lining their very own pockets, including doctors who allegedly put their patients in danger by illegally supplying them with opioids they didn’t need,” the Department of Justice said in a press release.
Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a press release: “These enforcement actions, including against one in all the most important healthcare frauds ever prosecuted by the Department of Justice, reflect our intensified efforts to combat fraud and prosecute those that take advantage of it.”
In keeping with the Department of Justice, in a program cited by Garland, executives of alleged software and services firms filed $1.9 billion in false claims to Medicare for items that were ineligible for reimbursement.
The defendants in the case are Brett Blackman and Gregory Schreck of Johnson County, Kansas, and Gary Cox of Maricopa County, Arizona, who allegedly used mass telemarketing operations to sell expensive and unnecessary medical equipment and prescriptions to the elderly and disabled, in accordance with an indictment in United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida.
The trio allegedly operated a software platform called DMERx that generated fake and fraudulent doctor orders in exchange for kickbacks and bribes.
Cox was the CEO of the corporate that originally operated the software behind the scam. He then sold the platform to an organization with Black as CEO and Schreck as vice chairman of business development.
In keeping with the indictment, the defendants allegedly received payments for guiding false orders and medical prescriptions to pharmacies, suppliers and telemarketers. The warrants and prescriptions implied that doctors were actually examining or treating patients, when in fact doctors were paid to sign documents by alleged telemedicine firms, the indictment alleges.
In lots of cases, doctors only had a transient telephone conversation with patients or didn’t interact in any respect, in accordance with the indictment. In an effort to cover the pattern, the defendants allegedly removed references to telemedicine from the ordinances.
In a separate case, the Justice Department also charged Steven Diamantstein, owner of Scripts Wholesale Inc., with a $150 million fraud involving HIV drugs.
Diamantstein, who lives in Brooklyn, Recent York, allegedly purchased HIV drugs at a major discount from people who obtained the pills illegally, paying patients money and repackaging them on the market.
Diamentstein then falsely claimed that his company obtained the drugs through legal channels, in accordance with an indictment in america District Court in Recent Jersey.
The Department of Justice also charged 24 physicians and health professionals in cases related to $150 million in fraudulent accounts involving illegal opioid distribution and lab test fraud.