A Texas Hospice Provider’s Deadly Scheme, Part 2

The Perfect Scam

AARP

True Crime, Aarp, Fraud, Society & Culture, Scam, Crime, Bobsullivan

4.5 • 980 Ratings

🗓️ 10 March 2023

⏱️ 47 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

As FBI Special Agent Cook and partners at the Department of Health and Human Services dig deeper into the records of Novus Healthcare, they are shocked to find fraud every step of the way. From falsifying required doctor visits to providing kickbacks to referring doctors, Novus CEO Bradley Harris and doctors, nurses and administrators are driven by greed. Together, the hospice group defrauded Medicare of more than $27 million and may have contributed to the premature deaths of countless patients.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This case boils down to one, the greed and control of Brad Harris and kind of everything that goes along with him, but also the abdication, the failure of the doctors to practice medicine,
0:16.3	to be true to their license, and to take oversight and care of their own patients.
0:20.9	They essentially outsourced it to Brad Harris with horrible, horrible consequences.
0:29.8	Welcome back to the perfect scam. I'm your host Bob Sullivan.
0:34.1	When we left our story last episode,
0:36.2	FBI investigator Tom Cook was looking into allegations
0:39.9	that a hospice company was mistreating patients, was falsifying medical records, and in some cases
0:46.0	the CEO Bradley Harris was ordering medical professionals to take steps so patients died more quickly so the company could make more money.
0:56.0	Well it was all kind of a whirlwind.
0:58.0	What we're talking about at the end of life for patients,
1:01.0	you know a hospice patient at the end of life is typically in a lot of pain and hospice, what we see very often is that those patients are prescribed really powerful narcotics, typically morphine for shortness of breath, sometimes
1:14.3	dilated as well as other pain medications. But when we showed the
1:19.2	records to outside medical experts, I mean they were horrified at the the amount the speed and the
1:26.0	volume of medication morphine is a very good drug when used appropriately but
1:32.1	when stacked hour after hour at very
1:35.3	high doses it becomes toxic. Investigators were so horrified that they turned what
1:40.5	could have been a typical Medicare fraud investigation into an urgent case, a matter of life and death.
1:47.0	The FBI, along with our other law enforcement partners, we kind of work cases in two realms and you have the typical health care fraud case which is about the dollars and then there are cases about patient harm.
2:03.4	With those patient harm concerns, we kick into a different gear.
2:07.0	A lot of the urgency is driven by evidence that Tom had seen on the CEO's cell phone.
2:12.4	As we mentioned last episode. that Tom had seen on the CEO's cell phone.
2:13.2	As we mentioned last episode, Bradley Harris was a compulsive texter, sometimes sending up to 2,000
	...

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