Feds Announce Record $375M Medicare Fraud Case Against Texas Doctor
Federal officials have announced the indictment of a Texas physician in what they are calling the largest Medicare fraud case in the nation’s history.
Dr. Jacques Roy, 54, who practices in the Dallas area, is accused of bilking taxpayers of nearly $375 million in nonexistent home health care services, the Los Angeles Times’ Nation Now blog reports.
Prosecutors, citing his wealth, multiple properties and a sailboat, are asking a federal judge in Dallas to hold him in custody until trial, as a flight risk. They say he had hidden much of his money in an offshore account and was planning to change his identity and flee prosecution, ABC News reports.
Nearly 80 home health care agencies that allegedly worked with the physician will be suspended from the Medicare program for as much as 18 months, the Nation Now post says.
Roy and an office manager, who is also charged, are accused of sending recruiters door-to-door and to a parking lot near a homeless shelter in order to persuade residents to sign bogus forms seeking reimbursement for care that wasn’t provided. Federal law enforcement officials say some were paid $50 for participating.
The feds claim the alleged scheme operated by Roy and his Medistat Group and Associates, which they say began in 2006, signed up more Medicare beneficiaries than any other medical practice in the U.S.—some 11,000 patients in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, according to ABC News.
The articles don’t include any comment from the defendants or their counsel.
