Nearly 200 people have been charged in a nationwide investigation into false health care claims involving losses estimated at about $2.75 billion, the Department of Justice (DOJ) announced Thursday.
Under the National Health Care Fraud Enforcement Action of 2024, the DOJ filed suit against 193 defendants, including 76 doctors, nurses and other licensed medical professionals in 32 different federal districts across the country.
The Justice Department said the government seized “more than $231 million in cash, luxury vehicles, gold and other assets” in a nationwide law enforcement operation.
“Whether you are a trafficker in a drug cartel or a corporate executive or a medical professional employed by a health care company, if you profit from the unlawful distribution of controlled substances, you will be held accountable,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement.
According to the Justice Department, the charges allege that five individuals and a digital technology company participated in a more than $900 million fraud scheme in Arizona related to amniotic fluid transplants, the unlawful distribution of Adderall pills and other stimulants.
Prosecutors allege two wound care company owners accepted more than $330 million as part of a scheme to fraudulently bill Medicare for wound transplants. Nurses were pressured to apply the wound grafts to patients who did not need them, including some people in hospice care who died on the day they received that care. This was reported by the Associated Press news agency.
The company’s married owners, Alexandra Gehrke and Jeffrey King, were arrested earlier this month at Phoenix International Airport before boarding a flight to London. Officials say they knew the charges were coming because information about erasing digital footprints was found in their home, the AP reported.
The DOJ also alleges that company executives perpetrated a $90 million fraud scheme by distributing counterfeit, misbranded HIV medications, more than $146 million in bogus addiction treatment programs, more than $1.1 billion in telemedicine and laboratory fraud, as well as $450 million in other health care fraud and opioid programs.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said his department's agents were proud to play a role in the multi-agency investigation.
“Believing that by his action, we in federal law enforcement are sending a clear and strong message – that we will hold accountable healthcare providers and prescribers who prey on their patients for profit and ignore the first rule of medical care: do no harm,” Mayorkas said in a statement.
