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.
From a warehouse in Sunset Park, Eric Vainer, 43, oversaw the operation with the help of his mother, Polina, 66, prosecutors said. “We can use the same patients like guinea pigs for anything we want,” Mr. Vainer was recorded saying in a government wiretap.
– From the New York Times article: 9 New York Doctors Are Accused of Defrauding Medicaid Using Homeless People
In America’s fraudulent oligarch economy in which corruption and theft have become the preferred means to earn money, it’s no surprise doctors feel a need to participate. Do no harm indeed.
From the New York Times:
“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.
From a warehouse in Sunset Park, Eric Vainer, 43, oversaw the operation with the help of his mother, Polina, 66, prosecutors said. “We can use the same patients like guinea pigs for anything we want,” Mr. Vainer was recorded saying in a government wiretap.
Typically, once patients arrived at a clinic, they would be seen by a podiatrist, the indictment says. The podiatrist would give a “fictitious diagnosis,” order more tests or specify equipment like orthotics or leg braces that the patient actually did not need. The podiatrist often referred the patient to additional doctors who were part of the scheme, including psychiatrists and pain-management specialists, who might sign the patient up for recurring visits that they could bill. Cardiologists and vein specialists, meanwhile, might bill as if they were reviewing their unnecessary tests without actually doing any reviewing, or claim to Medicaid they had done procedures that they never had.
After all of that, the patient would get to pick a pair of shoes, boots or sandals from a storeroom that, in at least one clinic, Mr. Thompson described as “like a shoe store.”
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.
They should’ve been bankers if they wanted to get away with it.
For related articles, see:
Video of the Day – John Oliver on Pharma Company “Marketing to Doctors”
Introducing “Physician Dispensing” – The Latest Troubling Medical Industry Scam
How Doctors Prescribing Meds Based on Drug Company Payoffs is Further Evidence of Systemic Failure
NYU Professor Uncovers How the FDA Systematically Covers Up Fraud and Misconduct in Drug Trials
In Liberty,
Michael Krieger
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This may be news in New York but it is a long standing practice here in Miami, Tampa, Jacksonville and West Palm Beach in Florida. Every year we read about more fraud “rings” being busted, what they cost the government which never seems to be able to stop it since it occurs again and again.
It appears the poor, for whom all this is tailored, are the culprits since they will sell their time and acquiescence for another bag of crack et al or just another bout of “consumerism”.
“the poor” are not the Culprits. The corrupt “doctors”looting the PUBLIC TREASURY are …… confiscate their material goods. EXECUTE THEM. Send their families a bill for the bullet.
When they steal OUR Medicare money, Workers go without healthcare.and the Nationi s undermined.
Why this is even a story is puzzling. It is raw human nature. 80% of the people are basically honest, 20% are prone to dishonesty (Pareto’s rule). 20% of the 20% (4%) are the real thieves. They either go into government or find a way to cheat their way through life (sort of the same thing). Government just gives these people an easy target.
No government organization wants to reduce the outlays from their program. Do you think a government agency cares where the money is going? Not a whit. The more money an agency spends this year the more they get next year. And the executives of that agency likely get a raise and a bump in classification.
Socialism/Communism denies any moral authority, so don’t expect this problem to get any better. Some of the worst corruption to date is present in countries trying to escape their Socialist/Communist present or past (see: Russia, China). The direction this country is headed will only make stories like this even more common.
Let me guess..
The perpetrators are majority “usual suspects” as per usual..
When I read this article carefully it didn’t seem as straight forward as the “indictment” implies. There are several things that don’t make sense such as why physicians with esteemed careers risk their reputations and accomplishments for money when they probably already had more than they would ever spend anyway? The accusers go to one item that’s charged what seems to be an extravagant price to the public but maybe it isn’t?
Just because a shoe insert seems to be expensive does that mean it is? Maybe the doctors found that shoes aren’t covered by Medicaid but shoe inserts are covered so they made it work in order to give the homeless shoes? Maybe the homeless don’t have medical care -they likely don’t- so performing tests that might seem useless are designed to establish a baseline and find out if someone is suffering unnecessarily? Maybe an illness is contributing to the homeless condition of the patient?
The entire article seems to be slanted dramatically one way but I think there are enough questions and inconsistencies that there’s a lot more to the story. Just because the government says you are a bad person doesn’t make it so.
The reason that things like this are ALLOWED to go on and rarely get caught is because the elites WANT to bankrupt the government so they can bring in Greece-style “austerity measures”. It is actually part of Hunger Games/ Agenda 21. This is also why we have open borders and give free welfare to anyone who can sneak across and want endless wars. Anything to destroy America as quickly as possible.