Dr. Fred Dweck, along with 14 people with whom he worked, was accused in an indictment of running a scam to tap a Medicare program that pays very high rates to care for the sickest patients.
Dweck referred about 1,279 Medicare beneficiaries for expensive and unnecessary home health and therapy services, bribing the owners of two Miami clinics to join the scam. He also faked medical certifications, according to the indictment.
A telephone listing for Dweck could not be found and it was unclear whether he had a lawyer.
“No matter what type of fraud is committed, there is one common denominator and that denominator is greed,’’ Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer said. “Medicare fraud is not a victimless crime. It hurts every American taxpayer by raising the cost of health care.’’
The raids came a week after a report that Miami-Dade County received more than half a billion dollars from Medicare in home health care payments intended for the sickest patients in 2008, which is more than the rest of the country combined, according to a report by the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Inspector General. Medicare paid the county about $520 million, even though only 2 percent of those patients receiving home health care live there.
In Detroit’s case, suspects paid recruiters to find patients willing to feign symptoms to justify expensive testing, including nerve conduction studies, federal authorities said.
A mother and son were charged in Brooklyn with billing Medicare $246 per patient for expensive shoe inserts reserved for diabetes patients, even though they only provided cheap over-the-counter versions.
Including yesterday’s arrests, a Medicare Fraud strike force formed by the Justice and Health departments has now charged suspects accused of bilking Medicare of more than $1 billion in less than two years.
The pilot strike force, which started in Miami in 2007, has indicted more than 460 suspects in fraud scams. The program is now in Los Angeles, Houston, and Detroit. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said yesterday the operation will expand to Tampa; Baton Rouge, La.; and Brooklyn.
Cleaning up an estimated $60 billion a year in Medicare fraud will be key to President Obama’s proposed health care overhaul.
