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California: Doctor Guilty In $12 Million Medicare Fraud

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Published on: October 17, 2019

Medicare is another one of those Socialist impositions in America.  Yes, I know you pay for it, but it’s demanded by the government even though they have never been authorized to be involved in anything like that in the first place.  Once again, this story demonstrates how your money is first abused by a government that has usurped its constitutional authority and how criminals are more than willing to commit fraud to obtain that money unconstitutionally confiscated.  A federal jury has found a southern California doctor guilty for his role in a $12 million Medicare fraud scheme.

According to the Justice Department, “After a six-day trial, Donald Woo Lee, 54, of Temecula, California, was found guilty of seven counts of health care fraud and one count of adulteration of a medical device.  Sentencing has been scheduled for March 19, 2020, before U.S. District Judge George Wu of the Central District of California, who presided over the trial.”

The scheme involved providing medically unnecessary procedures to Medicare beneficiaries, upcode claims submitted to Medicare, and the repackaging of single-use catheters for reuse on patients.

The DOJ reported:

According to evidence presented at trial, from 2012 to 2015, Lee engaged in a scheme in which he recruited Medicare beneficiaries to his clinics, falsely diagnosed the beneficiaries with venous insufficiency and provided the beneficiaries with medically unnecessary vein ablation procedures.  The evidence further established that Lee billed these unnecessary procedures to Medicare using an inappropriate code in order to obtain a higher reimbursement, a practice known as “upcoding.”  In addition, the evidence showed that Lee repackaged used, contaminated catheters for re-use on patients.  These catheters had been cleared by the FDA for marketing as single-use only.  Lee submitted claims of approximately $12 million to Medicare for the vein ablation procedures he performed, and received $4.5 million as a result, the evidence showed.

This case was investigated by the FBI, HHS-OIG and FDA-OCI, and was brought as part of the Medicare Fraud Strike Force, under the supervision of the Criminal Division’s Fraud Section and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California.  Trial Attorneys Alexis Gregorian and Emily Culbertson of the Fraud Section are prosecuting the case. 

The Fraud Section leads the Medicare Fraud Strike Force.  Since its inception in March 2007, the Medicare Fraud Strike Force, which maintains 15 strike forces operating in 24 districts, has charged more than 4,200 defendants who have collectively billed the Medicare program for nearly $19 billion.  In addition, the HHS Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, working in conjunction with the HHS-OIG, are taking steps to increase accountability and decrease the presence of fraudulent providers.

Lisa Malinowski of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration Office of Criminal Investigations’ (FDA-OCI) Los Angeles Field Office made the announcement.

Well, isn’t that nice?  The FDA has been involved in so much corruption of approving Big Pharma drugs for billions of dollars, drugs that not only have bad side effects, but have caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of deaths of Americans, according to the FDA’s own website.

Furthermore, if we simply eliminated the unconstitutional Medicare program, all of that money would not be subject to this kind of criminal activity.

After all, how long do you think it took the feds to figure out $12 million worth of fraud?  Any you know this isn’t the only instance.

On top of that, Lee will probably spend years in federal prison at the expense of the same taxpayers that he just helped take for $12 million.

In the end, the bill for Mr. Lee’s crime will not really be borne by Mr. Lee, but by the American taxpayer to the tune of millions of dollars more to feed clothe and house him for his “paying his debt to society,” whatever sort of ridiculous notion that is.  The truth is that he will be comfy and society will be the ones paying for his crime.

Think about it, America.

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