Karliner
Barney slappin skinPosted on 10/22/2012 2:32:09 PM PDT by Nachum
House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa subpoenaed the Obama administration Monday for documents he believes will expose Medicare malfeasance by Department of Health and Human Services officials.
The move, confirmed by an aide to the California Republican, makes good on a threat Issa issued last week, when he demanded reams of data from HHS by 5 p.m. on Thursday. Although the agency dumped 1,300 pages at his doorstep just before the deadline, he contended that the information was garbled and unresponsive to his request.
Issa is seeking documents and communications related to a pilot program initiated by HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius in the Medicare Advantage program, which permits Medicare-eligible seniors to select a private health plan rather than traditional Medicare.
Medicare Advantage was due for substantial cuts authorized by the Affordable Care Act, but the pilot program provided quality bonus payments to the private insurance plans that are effectively offsetting more than 70 percent of the cuts this year, according to the Government Accountability Office.
(Excerpt) Read more at politico.com ...
The list, Ping
Let me know if you would like to be on or off the ping list
ObamaCare will give thieves like these more million dollar oportunities to defraud us.
FBI arrests historic Houston hospital’s CEO, son, 5 others
By Terri Langford | Thursday, October 4, 2012
After 30 years as CEO of one of Houston’s most historic hospitals, Earnest Gibson III, along with his son and five others, was arrested on Thursday - part a national Medicare fraud sweep involving $430 million in bogus billings and 91 health care providers in seven states.
If the allegations against the 68-year-old Gibson are true, that he and others at the hospital bilked the Medicare program of $158 million over a period of more than seven years, it could prove lethal for Riverside, once the primary hospital for the city’s black population.
Gibson and his son Earnest Gibson IV, 35, were charged with 13 counts: conspiracy to commit health care fraud; conspiracy to defraud the United States and pay and receive health care kickbacks; one count of money laundering and ten counts of violating the anti-kickback statute.
They are among dozens of individuals who were arrested or surrendered Thursday as indictments were unsealed nationwide. The Gibsons are accused of teaming up with Riverside’s previously indicted assistant administrator, Mohammad Khan, who pleaded guilty in the scheme in February.
Together, the indictment alleges, the three created a plan that paid up to $3,200 in cash to “patient recruiters.” The recruiters, in turn, would pay Houston-area group-home owners to send patients to Riverside’s satellite clinics offering “partial hospitalization programs” for the mentally ill.
Son blames employee~
“In Texas alone, these indictments say these alleged defrauders, including doctors and nurses, submitted $258.3 million in fraudulent claims to Medicare,” said U.S. Rep. Kevin Brady. The Woodlands Republican - along with Rep. Gene Green, D-Houston, and Harris County District Attorney Pat Lykos - contacted Medicare authorities three years ago about explosive fraud in Houston.
Gibson has been president and CEO of the hospital since 1982.
His son told the Chronicle in July that the hospital, which was the Houston Negro Hospital until 1961, was being penalized for one rogue employee: Khan.
“These are people who need help,” the younger Gibson said. “The Medicare fraud team is fraud themselves. It’s not like I’m doing what Dr. Khan was doing.”
Although licensed as a general hospital by the Texas Department of State Health Services, Riverside’s client base is mostly the mentally ill or patients with substance abuse problems.
The older Gibson told the Chronicle earlier this year that $60 million had been paid to Riverside and its clinics by Medicare in the last five years.
According to the indictments, Medicare-eligible patients were supposedly lured to Riverside’s programs with cigarettes, food and coupons redeemable in the hospital’s on-site “Country Store.” The items in the store, according to a price sheet, cost from $2 to $30 and included a variety of goods - from Kleenex and candy bars to radios and disposable cameras.
Partial hospitalization clinics offer an intensive, five-day-a-week counseling program designed to avoid costly, overnight psychiatric stays.
According to prosecutors, the clinics, including Devotions Care Solutions, run by the younger Gibson, filed claims using Riverside’s Medicare provider number. The claims, the indictment stated, “were not medically necessary and, in some cases, not provided.”
$46.2 million in dispute~
Of the $158 million in phony claims filed between January 2005 and June 2012, Medicare paid $46.2 million to Riverside.
Three of the five recruiters: William Bullock III, Robert Ferguson and Regina Askew, were charged with all but the money laundering charge. A fourth recruiter, Leslie Clark, faces 11 charges involving kickbacks, and the fifth, Robert Crane, a driver for Riverside and a recruiter, was charged only with conspiracy to defraud via kickbacks. All but Clark were released on bond Thursday.
Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee intervenes~
What happens to Riverside or its patients now is unclear.
On June 8, four months after Khan’s arrest, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services stopped all payments to Riverside.
Ten days later, U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Houston, whose husband, Elwyn Lee, once served on Riverside’s board, urged acting Medicare administrator Marilyn Tavenner to reconsider.
“It appears that, in suspending the Medicare payments you in effect have jeopardized some of the most vulnerable patients whose access to Medicare is literally their lifeline,” the congresswoman wrote in a letter.
Sometime in August, 70 percent of the payments to Riverside were restored. The agency did not respond to requests for comment Thursday.
“None of us condone the heinousness of widespread fraud in our medical care system,” Jackson Lee said in a statement Thursday. “This historic hospital with many valuable programs should not be closed. And I hope the community will rally around those patients who come every day for help.”
They hold hearings and nothing is done. No action. They’ll say this administration needs to do something.
Always disappointed at the GOP House.
In my opinion, ObamaCare is Obama’s Holocaust!
***** “In my opinion, ObamaCare is Obama’s Holocaust!” *****
For me it is just Prison and Confiscation of Property
I will not Buy Obama Care... I will not Pay the Fine
My retirement and Healthcare will be provided for in Prison... they will never let me out because i will try every day to burn it down and destroy everything and everyone that works there.
I can organize too Obama
TT
Karliner
Barney slappin skinEric Holder proved there is no downside to lying repeatedly to Congress.
It doesn’t take a mensa member to figure out that our republic is history. Only the shell of it remains. Obama set precedents that will not be corrected by Romney. They await to be further abused and will end in hard tyranny.
BUMP
Obama has done 20,000 things that Romney won’t hardly begin to undo. The federal bureaucracy has officially become part of the Democrat Party, and Romney will find that it would rather continue following Obama policies than his.
Watch the left cry foul if Romney even thinks of dumping some of the crap they have instituted within the executive branch. Not to mention all of the crap done outside it.
No big wig's will go to jail and be fined.
Nada, nothing, nyet!!
The president isn’t a king/dictator. If the House gets more real conservatives, and if by some twist of fate the Senate goes R majority, then they can tell Romney what to do. I can’t see him vetoing bills that reduce fedgov insanity.
They will not tell Romney to do. The RINO-Dem Coalition will keep their majority no matter what party wins.
They will not tell Romney to do. The RINO-Dem Coalition will keep their majority no matter what party wins.
>>The president isn’t a king/dictator.
Kings typically showed responsibility; they cared enough about their kingdom to pass on the same prerogatives and lands to their sons. A wealthier realm was in their interest. BTW, Anti-Federalists actually made the argument that Presidents lacked the responsibility of kings and were therefore dangerous to our liberties. Their prediction came true with Obama, who obviously failed the test of responsibility. He worked toward a weakened, leftist utopian America.
Dictators rule by decree through force and fear, without the consent of the governed. This is the trend of Obama. All that remains, and nothing else, to oppose him are those pesky elections.
I will dutifully vote next month, and whom we put in Congress still makes some difference, but for how long?
I think we are in the beginning of a change, and I don’t agree with you.
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