After a 2 year investigation the FBI indicted the hospital executive Rudra Sabaratnam and his accomplice Estill Mitts for a scheme that is estimated to have cost Californians millions of dollars in fraudulent health care payments. The scheme involved finding Skid Row individuals who qualified for Medicare or MediCal, paying them $20-30, sending them by ambulance to the hospital, giving them phony medical histories and then treating them for something they didn't have. According to the story one woman almost died from being treated for fake high blood pressure which she did not have. The real medicines dropped her normal blood pressure dangerously low. She was not treated for any of the medical problems she did have.
Rocky Delgadillo along with the FBI will be bringing these greedy worms to justice. Thank Heavens for actual Public Servants!
This is not the first time Sabaratnam and his associate Bourseau have been in trouble over fraud. Nor are they the only ones who have ever stolen money from 'We the People' through Medicare and Medicaid scams.
But consider this: had we Health Care for All, HR 676, (or here in California SB 840) such schemes could never happen. Homeless people, as all people, would be getting medically necessary care. Hospitals wouldn't have to cheat to fill beds with paying patients because they would be receiving pay for each and every patient that took up a bed and they most likely would be full or near full all the time.
I have actually worked (very tangentially) with one of the doctors from the Orange County Tustin Hospital. It was a shock to see his name in one sense. But in another sense, it becomes the culmination of our times. Greed overcomes even those who are supposed to at least 'do no harm' and at most bring the patient to the best possible outcome. It is just unfathomable that a doctor would manipulate people and put their lives in jeopardy by prescribing unneeded treatments and drugs all for ill-gotten gains. And it's equally disturbing that my fellow nurses might not have followed standard protocols for assessing and giving medicines. Nor did the hospitals follow the community standard of having the attending physician physically examine the patient within at least the first 24 hours. A lot of people had to look the other way for these things to have happened.
If I, as a Registered Nurse, give the wrong drug to my patient or even the right drug at the wrong time, it can be grounds for termination and possible action against my license. Even if there is no harm done to the patient. These criminals, for profit, repeatedly used individuals as money-making pawns sending them to the hospital, ginning up stories about their medical problems and giving them drugs and treatments that could have seriously harmed or killed them, they did not need. Their crimes are gigantic. Their punishments must be likewise.
And then we assure that this never happens again by enacting Single Payer HealthCare for ALL--HR 676.
Cross-posted at www.guaranteedhealthcare.org