North Texas hospice fraud case that bilked Medicare out of $40M ends with doctor guilty verdicts
Hospice patients facing imminent death qualify for around-the-clock care, allowing providers to bill at higher rates.
Novus Health Services, a Frisco hospice company, wanted more of those patients regardless of whether or not they were near death, federal prosecutors said. Greed was the motivation, and Novus overmedicated those patients with potent painkillers like morphine to justify the higher billings to Medicare, officials said.
The decision about which drugs to administer and in what doses was made primarily by Novus’ CEO, Bradley Harris, an accountant with no medical training, as well as his nurses, court documents say. Some patients were seriously harmed and even died as a result of those decisions, prosecutors said.
Harris, 40, of Frisco, and about a dozen other defendants in the Novus health care fraud case have already pleaded guilty in federal court. The last three defendants -- two doctors and a nurse -- went to trial and were convicted this week on multiple counts of health care fraud in Dallas.
Read more: https://www.dallasnews.com/news/crime/2021/05/28/north-texas-hospice-fraud-case-that-bilked-medicare-out-of-40-million-ends-with-doctor-guilty-verdicts/
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