Holly Vossel reported for The Hospice News on July 26 that a hospice physician in California faces up to 10 years in prison for defrauding the Medicare system by falsely claiming that his patients were terminal and thus qualifying them under Medicare for hospice. Vossel reported:
Two years following his arrest, Dr. Victor Contreras, 68, recently pled guilty to one count of health care fraud. Contreras served as a physician for two Pasadena-based providers, Saint Mariam Hospice Inc. and Arcadia Hospice Provider Inc.
Contreras defrauded Medicare of nearly $4 million in false and fraudulent hospice claims from July 2016 to February 2019, according to the plea agreement. U.S. District Judge André Birotte Jr. has scheduled a sentencing hearing for October 25, with Contreras facing a maximum of 10 years in federal prison.
“Contreras falsely stated on claims forms that patients had terminal illnesses to make them eligible for hospice services covered by Medicare, typically adopting diagnoses provided to him by hospice employees whether or not they were true,” the U.S. Department of Justice Attorney’s Office in the Central District of California indicated in a statement. “Contreras did so even though he was not the patients’ primary care physician and had not spoken to those primary care physicians about the patients’ conditions.”
This issue is significant for several reasons.
The authorities are concerned with approximately $30 million in Medicare fraud.
I am concerned with the ease of falsely declaring patients terminal considering that the same criteria for qualifying for hospice care also qualifies a patient for assisted suicide in California. Did any of Contreras’s patients fraudulently die by assisted suicide?
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Vossel also reported for The Hospice News that:
Arcadia Hospice Provider submitted false Medicare claims to the tune of $23 million. Meanwhile, St. Mariam Hospice submitted nearly $13.5 million in false claims. Contreras was allegedly involved in roughly $5.1 million of these, according to the Justice Department.
Additional charges were issued to medical industry marketer Callie Jean Black, 65, who allegedly recruited patients for the hospice companies in exchange for illegal kickbacks, the Justice Department reported. Black was also arrested in 2022 and has pleaded not guilty to the charges. A sentencing trial is scheduled for October 15.
The charges also included the owner of the two hospice companies, Juanita Antenor, 61, who remains at large. Authorities have not been able to locate Antenor throughout the two-year investigation. The Justice Department believed Antenor could have relocated to the Philippines as of 2022, though nothing has been publicly confirmed.
The Euthanasia Prevention Coalition demands an audit of the medical records for people who have been approved for assisted suicide in California.
Further to that, we recognize that if such levels of Medicare fraud and falsely diagnosing people as terminal is possible in California, then it must also be possible in all American jurisdictions and even Canada.
Laws that permit the killing of people by assisted suicide can be abused but with assisted suicide, the outcome is death.
LifeNews.com Note: Alex Schadenberg is the executive director of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition and you can read his blog here.
The post Doctor Faces Prison for Falsely Claiming His Patients Were Terminal appeared first on LifeNews.com.
