New York Post did a feature story about this several years ago. Perhaps they were who alerted the clueless government.
[From article]
“Free sneakers, shoes and boots today,” Bernard Rorie shouted, standing outside a soup kitchen in East New York, Brooklyn, where he was being recorded by investigators
Mr. Rorie was recruiting homeless people, prosecutors said, and whoever had a valid
Medicaid card would be packed into a van and sent to medical clinics around New York City. There, after hours of unnecessary tests and fake diagnoses, the homeless people would be sent off with sneakers — selected from stacks of shoeboxes in the clinics’ basements. The doctors, staff members and billing specialists, meanwhile, would rack up hundreds or thousands of dollars per recruit in false
Medicaid claims, prosecutors said.
On Tuesday, nine New York doctors were among 23 people indicted in State Supreme Court in Brooklyn in connection with the sneaker scheme, which the Brooklyn district attorney’s office said made almost $7 million and took advantage of thousands of homeless people.
The charges in the indictment include health fraud, enterprise corruption and money laundering.
[. . .]
“Free sneakers, shoes and boots today,” Bernard Rorie shouted, standing outside a soup kitchen in East New York, Brooklyn, where he was being recorded by investigators
Mr. Rorie was recruiting homeless people, prosecutors said, and whoever had a valid
Medicaid card would be packed into a van and sent to medical clinics around New York City. There, after hours of unnecessary tests and fake diagnoses, the homeless people would be sent off with sneakers — selected from stacks of shoeboxes in the clinics’ basements. The doctors, staff members and billing specialists, meanwhile, would rack up hundreds or thousands of dollars per recruit in false
Medicaid claims, prosecutors said.
On Tuesday, nine New York doctors were among 23 people indicted in State Supreme Court in Brooklyn in connection with the sneaker scheme, which the Brooklyn district attorney’s office said made almost $7 million and took advantage of thousands of homeless people.
The charges in the indictment include health fraud, enterprise corruption and money laundering.
[. . .]
The doctors in the group made money by, for instance, seeing a patient for four minutes and billing for 30 minutes, or claiming they had reviewed tests when they had not, or simply billing for procedures they had never done, prosecutors said. Some doctors paid Mr. Vainer a referral fee for each recruit, while some split the Medicaid payment with him.
Mr. Vainer made money from the scheme in several ways: He owns medical clinics where the patients were sent; he supplies devices for foot and leg problems; and he had financial arrangements with doctors to whom he sent the recruited homeless patients, prosecutors said.
Mr. Vainer also made money by supplying cheap equipment and billing it to Medicaid as a custom medical device — for instance, supplying a drugstore shoe insert and billing it to Medicaid as a custom orthotic, for which he received about $330.
[. . .]
Some of the doctors involved are affiliated with well-known institutions. Dr. Joseph Grossman, 82, a cardiologist, was a clinical assistant professor of medicine at New York Medical College. The vein surgeon Dr. David Glass, 65, a former assistant chief of surgery at New York Methodist, is an assistant clinical professor at Cornell, according to
his website. Dr. Grossman and Dr. Glass pleaded not guilty.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/01/nyregion/9-new-york-doctors-indicted-in-medicaid-fraud-using-homeless-patients.html?_r=1
9 New York Doctors Are Accused of Defrauding Medicaid Using Homeless People
By
STEPHANIE CLIFFORD
MARCH 31, 2015
