Inside Report
In its first two years , the Strike Force in Baton Rouge has obtained charges against 41 people for alleged Medicare rip-offs.
Medicare’s $1.3 billion in daily expenditures help the nation’s elderly, blind and disabled cope with medical bills. But those dollars also are a big target for white-collar criminals, notes Bill Root, assistant special agent in charge of Louisiana investigations for the Office of Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Health and Human Services estimates that thieves devise health-care fraud schemes to steal as much as $60 billion annually, Root added.
The nation’s first Medicare Fraud Strike Force was established in 2007 in Miami to combat such thefts. Since then, eight other Strike Force offices have been placed in Baton Rouge, Los Angeles, Detroit, Houston, Brooklyn, N.Y., Tampa, Fla., Chicago and Dallas.
Over the past four years, that nationwide network of federal Strike Force prosecutors and FBI and HHS investigators has obtained 955 indictments and won convictions against 506 people who caused Medicare losses of $543.9 million, Root said.
In its first two years, the Strike Force in Baton Rouge has obtained charges against 41 people for alleged Medicare rip-offs. Defendants include owners of medical equipment suppliers, people they hired to recruit patients, and physicians, therapists, licensed clinical social workers and others.
Some doctors allegedly accepted kickbacks in return for prescriptions they wrote for expensive power wheelchairs that either were not needed by patients or never delivered. Some recruiters are alleged to have paid bribes either to obtain those prescriptions or for confidential lists of patients, their Social Security numbers and their Medicare numbers. All defendants are alleged to have acted with one purpose — defrauding Medicare.
So far, 18 of the people charged in Baton Rouge have either pleaded guilty or been convicted at trial in cases involving combined Medicare losses of $7.4 million.
Zachary resident Henry Lamont Jones, 36, has been convicted with eight other people in two of those cases. Losses in those two scams totaled $6.7 million.
Now, Jones faces a third Medicare fraud trial, with other defendants, in February. Justice Department prosecutors Ben Curtis and David M. Maria estimate Medicare losses in that case at $8 million.
Jones began working as a recruiter for Prairieville equipment supplier Nnanta Felix Ngari, 54, with whom he was convicted in August. Jones and his ex-wife later took over a different medical supply company and worked to increase their share of the take, jurors decided this month.
Jones previously served prison time for state convictions for second-degree battery and accessory after the fact to armed robbery.
On Myspace, Jones once bragged he made his first $1 million in 2006, adding: “It would be the first of many to come.”
Bill Lodge covers federal courts for The Advocate. He can be reached at blodge@theadvocate.com.