Frist and family had to pay $1.7 BILLION fine for medicare/medicaid fraud

Maraya1969

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Tue Nov-01-05 07:04 PM
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Frist and family had to pay $1.7 BILLION fine for medicare/medicaid fraud

DOUG IRELAND: Well, the interesting thing that we're not reading in the mainstream corporate media is just what the Frist family company, H.C.A., Hospital Corporation of America, was all about. When the Bush administration came into office, H.C.A. was, had been for nearly a decade, the target of one of the most extensive federal investigations of any corporation in the history of the United States. And H.C.A. was, in fact, one of the largest corporate swindles in American history.

The company that provided the family money that Bill Frist used to buy himself a Senate seat from the State of Tennessee was obtained by fraud, and fraud on the government. H.C.A. defrauded for years and years the programs designed to help poor Americans get healthcare. H.C.A. defrauded Medicaid. It defrauded Medicare. And it defrauded Tricare, which is of course, the federal program that covers the military and their families. The government case against H.C.A. was basically that the Frist family company kept two sets of books and fraudulently overbilled the government. It inflated its expenses. It billed the government for inflated overrun.

It violated both law and medical ethics when the company increased its Medicare billings by exaggerating the seriousness of illnesses they were treating. It bribed doctors in a whole scale bribery operation. It gives them partnerships in H.C.A. hospitals as a kickback for the doctors referring patients to H.C.A. It gave them free gifts, loans that were never expected to be paid back, gave them free rent, free office furniture, free drugs from hospital pharmacies. All of this to bribe the doctors into referring patients to H.C.A. companies.

When the Bushies came in at a time when this investigation, which the deputy F.B.I. director said was one of the most important the F.B.I. had ever conducted into corporate America, it was expected that Bill Frist's brother, Thomas, who was one of the richest men in America -- Fortune estimated he had over $2 billion -- was going to be indicted, along with a raft of H.C.A. executives.

But the Bushies and John Ashcroft decided otherwise. And they arranged a little sweetheart deal with the Frist family, with Bill Frist's brother, Tom, and the executives of the Frist family business, H.C.A., that let them get off the hook without any jail time. They did have to pay a fine, and the size of the fine tells you just how massive the fraud was, because the fine was for $1.7 billion, with a “b”, $1.7 billion that H.C.A. had to pay the government for the fraud that it had committed.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Now, Doug, that was one of the largest fines in U.S. history, wasn't it?

DOUG IRELAND: It was the largest. It broke the record. The previous old record had been set by Drexel Burnham.

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/09/29/1812254