If you’re an avid consumer of this website or of Dallas healthcare news, then you might remember the brief I wrote several months back about an FBI raid at Medoc Health Services, citing the Dallas Morning News.
Since then, I spoke to former employees at the Dallas-based firm who detail what they say is a massive scheme in which Medoc acted as prescription manager on behalf of physicians grouped into the aforementioned businesses, to the detriment of their patients. As I wrote in my September column in D CEO, sources allege that the physicians involved gave Medoc a lot of leeway to handle their prescriptions, allowing the company to select drugs that would return the highest possible reimbursements. From the column:
As the sources’ story goes, patients would end up with piles of pills and creams they didn’t need, and Medoc executives needed rakes to gather their cash. At its peak, a source says the company was bringing in $1 million a day. The physicians involved also made out well, splitting the profits from the prescriptions they wrote among their respective LLCs—after Medoc’s cut—and receiving monthly checks that ranged at one point between $20,000 and $30,000, one source says. That was a couple years ago, when insurance companies were granting $20,000-plus reimbursements for compounded pain creams, which Medoc execs had drawers of in their offices, having received the “scrips” from physicians in their network, sources allege. The sources also allege that Medoc representatives signed scrips on behalf of physicians in order to pass insurance-company audits.
The story goes on to examine the ways that healthcare fraud can impact all of us, even those who don’t work in healthcare (an expert tells me the amount of fraud in the system “could be north of $100 billion.”) The piece went online Monday—read it here.
