"We're talking in the hundreds of millions, easily," Vainer said. "The profit this company raked from those two schemes, only from those two drugs, was hundreds of millions of dollars."...
Life Care Centers of America, Inc. is such a patriot name, too. Congress, the USA House and Senate, better be doing everything they can do to preserve the entitlements while bringing them into the scope of legal expenditures. If there is any Congressman or Congresswoman supporting fraud within out entitlements by being silent and/or removing funding from the ability to prosecute these criminals they need to be removed from Congress immediately. They need to be brought up on ethic violations as well.
"Looking the other way is not an option. Empowering criminals is not an option." There are legal medical facilities striving to thrive !!!
by Thomas M. Burton
December 3, 2012, 7:26 p.m. ET
A Tennessee-based nursing-care company systematically defrauded Medicare of millions of dollars by pressuring therapists to perform expensive, unnecessary treatments, according to a recently unsealed federal complaint.
The filing against Life Care Centers of America Inc. is part of an investigation by the Office of Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services into high-priced nursing care. The inspector general reported last month that Medicare loses about $1.5 billion annually from over billing by skilled-nursing facilities....
Allowing fraud and corruption, which was rampant under the previous Republican administration and congressional majorities, to preserve jobs is not an option.
One of the complaints and worries of the Republicans in Congress since 2008 was the further collapse of the job situation as the Obama Administration was determined to stop the sapping of the entitlements for the benefit of faux economic development. Some of the economic strategy of the previous Republican majorities was to look the other way to allow jobs look better than was LEGITIMATELY permitted. One of the reasons they despise regulations is because they don't know how to grow the economy. They allow fraud and illegal dipping into 'vats of money' such as Medicare to make them look good. When the criminals are caught they are all over it, of course, but they don't do anything to end it in the first place. They rely on the citizen to report fraud. Right.
By REUTERS
Published: October 4, 2012
WASHINGTON (Reuters) — Ninety-one people including doctors, nurses and other medical professionals were charged criminally after an investigation of Medicare fraud that involved $430 million in false billing in seven cities, officials said on Thursday.
It was the government’s second big raid in recent months after a similar investigation in May involving $452 million in possible fraud in Medicare, the health program for the elderly and disabled.
The accusations include billing the government for unnecessary ambulance rides in California, writing prescriptions for patients in Dallas who did not qualify for them and paying kickbacks like food and cigarettes to patients in Houston if they attended programs for which a hospital could bill.
The investigation is part of an effort by the Obama administration to find health care savings....
The preservation of the Bush Tax Cuts has to end. Throwing a SYMBOLIC preservation limit at $450,000 is outrageous! It is corruption and it is political pandering by the Republicans. They need to rehab their images and their party's priorities; which won't happen so long as they continue to pander to the wealthy.
I am still trying to figure out how the GOP actually pulled this one off. A Florida Governor that scalped Medicare for a living. Amazing.
Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2008/08/03/627480/medicare-fraud-rampant-in-south.html#storylink=cp
Posted on Sunday, 08.03.08
BY JAY WEAVER
JWEAVER@MIAMIHERALD.COM
First in a series
Whenever Alexander McCray lights up his crack pipe, U.S. taxpayers help pay for his habit.
McCray has defrauded Medicare by selling his government-issued health card number to private clinics in exchange for kickbacks of $150 to $300 a visit -- as often as three times a day, three times a week over seven years, according to federal records and his own admission.
McCray has signed off on phony infusion treatments for his HIV illness -- therapy that is medically obsolete -- and he has received thousands of dollars from Medicare-licensed clinics all over South Florida.
Money that he has used to buy crack cocaine.
Dozens of clinic operators have in turn filed more than $1.1 million in false claims for fabricated HIV-infusion treatments billed in his name, according to Medicare records reviewed by The Miami Herald. Some 90 doctors, including one indicted in May, appeared on the phony prescriptions written on behalf of McCray....
Scott's case was one of the largest in history. Yet, he wins governorship. The small fraud cases are at least as important as the huge ones. It is important those receiving Medicare as a benefit for health care pay attention to the monies being charged their insurance, too. The small ones add up. It is the small ones where it all begins as criminals learn what they can get away with. The huge fraud cases make the headlines and provide a political benefit to those enforcing the law, but, the small infringements of the laws of the USA are just as important.
May 20, 2010
By Sally Kestin, Sun Sentinel
Now the man who ran the company at the time wants to be Florida's governor.
Rick Scott was co-founder and CEO of Columbia/HCA in the 1990s, when the FBI launched a massive, multi-state investigation that led to the company pleading guilty to criminal charges of overbilling the government....
It has been difficult for Governor Scott to move the unemployment rate. It makes sense it has been difficult for him, since he never legitimately created any as a CEO.
I don't know why I would be astounded by Scott's election and lack of his ability to actually grow an economy; even with plenty of rehab money coming from the BP Deepwater Horizon oil disaster; Cheney and Bush were Wall Street flunkies, too. They couldn't grow an economy either. It is a uniquely Republican dynamic guaranteed to Bubble and Bust the economy while destroying the American Dream. The Republicans, with some exceptions, are about money and not quality of life for Americans.
Updated: Tuesday, November 27th, 2012
By Katie Sanders
...Scott celebrated the state's declining unemployment rate, which hit its lowest point in almost four years in October. At 8.5 percent, the rate is still higher than the national unemployment rate.
In a news release, he counted off several signs of growth, including increases in job postings, an uptick in consumer confidence and a trade surplus. He delighted in the creation of 12,100 private sector jobs and ignored the fact that government jobs got a 2,600-position boost....
