After initially pleading not guilty last year, a local woman pleaded guilty last week to defrauding insurers out of more than $7 million for COVID-19 testing that never happened.
Connie Jo Clampitt and her partner, lab technician Terrance Barnard, were indicted in December for healthcare fraud. Clampitt admitted to fraudulently billing insurance companies more than $30 million and receiving $7 million in reimbursements for fake COVID-19 tests.
The flow of federal and state dollars dispersed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic has been fertile ground for fraud. A CEO was indicted for making claims about procuring COVID-19 tests in the early days of the pandemic, a lab owner pleaded guilty to bundling COVID-19 tests with other medically unnecessary lab tests and billed to Medicare, and scammers are calling Medicare recipients and offering free COVID-19 tests to get their Medicare information to bill it for other services fraudulently.
Between March 2021 and April 2022, Clampitt admitted to conspiring with Bernard and others to defraud several major insurance companies, including Blue Cross Blue Shield, Cigna, United Healthcare, Humana, and Molina Healthcare. She admitted to controlling and operating TC Diagnostics, ME Diagnostics, and PHR Diagnostics with Bernard and purported them to be advanced labs with diagnostic testing abilities for COVID-19.
She admitted in court documents that these entities were shell companies that never operated labs with COVID-19 testing abilities. To make the fraud more convincing, Clampitt revealed that these companies maintained physical locations.
Clampitt says that she helped Bernard access patient names, insurance information, birthdates, and other information from labs where he was employed as a contract lab technician using electronic health records. Using billing software, they used the information to generate false and fraudulent claims for COVID-19 testing from insurance companies.
The claims said that COVID-19 tests had been requested by the patients when they hadn’t, and also said that tests had been performed when no testing occurred by those entities.
Clampitt agreed to forfeit $2.5 million from the fraud in several bank accounts as well as a 1965 Ford Mustang, a 2013 Ford Shelby GT, a Lexus SUV, several luxury watches, and a 22-year-old Pontiac Grand Am. The plea agreement also lists a home outside of Tulsa, Oklahoma, and another property in Terrell, Texas, as part of the forfeiture.
Clampitt faces up to five years in federal prison as part of the plea.
“As the country struggled to cope with a devastating pandemic, this defendant conspired to defraud insurance providers out of millions of dollars. She exploited the healthcare system when it was most vulnerable, indirectly raising healthcare costs for everyday Americans. We are proud to hold her accountable for her role in this conspiracy and look forward to proving our case against her co-conspirators in court,” said U.S. Attorney Leigha Simonton.
Also charged in the scheme are Terrance Barnard, William Paul Gray, and Donn Hogg, who have neither pleaded guilty nor been convicted.
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