A Texas Hospice Provider's Deadly Scheme, Part 1
The Perfect Scam
AARP
4.5 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 3 March 2023
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Hospice is an essential service that many families depend on during a difficult time, but the combination of loved ones under emotional stress plus hospice benefits provided by Medicare can attract unscrupulous operators. When Judy's mother enters care with Novus Healthcare, a Dallas-based hospice provider, Judy soon realizes that something isn't right. Rather than providing comfort, Novus staff push back on even the most basic care requests. Meanwhile, Novus and its CEO, Bradley Harris, are attracting the attention of FBI Special Agent Thomas Cook. What he and his colleagues uncover is even worse than they imagined.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This week on The Perfect Scamp. |
| 0:03.0 | And the text ends with a text that says, |
| 0:07.0 | if we're going to be dirty, I want to be real dirty. |
| 0:10.0 | If we're going to be dirty, I want to be real dirty. Wow. |
| 0:17.0 | Welcome back to the perfect scam. |
| 0:19.0 | I'm your host Bob Sullivan. |
| 0:21.0 | Hospice is a beautiful essential service that can help families deal with an incredibly difficult and sensitive time in life. |
| 0:30.0 | It can allow death with dignity for people who are terminally ill. |
| 0:35.0 | Back in the 1980s, the US extended hospice coverage to Medicare patients, |
| 0:40.0 | ensuring that more Americans would have access to this critical benefit. |
| 0:45.0 | Unfortunately, unscrupulous operators often try to cheat Medicare through criminal enterprises, |
| 0:52.0 | and hospice benefits have been a target of such |
| 0:54.8 | criminals. Now stealing billions from taxpayers is bad enough but sometimes |
| 1:00.5 | these criminals actually put patients and their health care at risk. |
| 1:05.0 | And in today's story, you'll hear about an almost unthinkable crime. |
| 1:10.0 | A company so desperate to steal for Medicare that its CEO actually instructed |
| 1:16.1 | doctors and nurses to take steps designed to make the patients die faster |
| 1:22.1 | so the firm would be more profitable. |
| 1:25.0 | But thanks in part to our first guest, they didn't get away with it. |
| 1:30.0 | My mother retired from Neiman Marcus, I worked in the ladies ready to wear. She was the |
| 1:35.6 | seamstress as well, but her primary job function was in sales. That's Judy Vannebel |
| 1:42.1 | Grogan, who lives in Tyler, Texas, about 90 minutes east of Dallas. |
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