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A former general counsel for insurance company WellCare Health Plans is being sentenced to prison for making false statements in a 35 million dollar fraud scheme against the Medicaid program. America’s Lawyer Mike Papantonio discusses.
Transcript:
Finally tonight, some good news. A former general counsel for insurance company WellCare Health Plans is being sentenced to prison for making false statements in a 35 million dollar fraud scheme against the Medicaid program. He’ll be joining executives of that company that were also sentenced to prison for cheating the program that is used to aid the poor.
Prosecutors say WellCare executive Todd Farha, and others, filed false Medicaid expense reports to Florida’s healthcare administration. They did this by overstating the amount their companies spent on mental health services for Medicaid patients.
Companies are typically required by law to spend a special percentage of Medicaid money they receive for mental health services and return what wasn’t spent back to the government. Instead of following the law, WellCare created a new unit to pay mental health providers but kept tens of millions of dollars of Medicaid financing for themselves.
After eight years of watching white collar criminals never going to prison, maybe this new DOJ will be willing to change that ugly trend that’s killing democracy, where we don’t prosecute billionaires. We’ll see.
