WASHINGTON — Hundreds of people nationwide, including dozens of doctors, have been charged in health care fraud prosecutions, accused of collectively defrauding the government of about $1.3 billion, the Justice Department said Thursday.
Nearly one-third of the 412 charged were accused of opioid-related crimes. The health care providers, some 50 of them doctors, had billed Medicare and Medicaid for drugs that were never purchased; collected money for false rehabilitation treatments and tests; and given out prescriptions for cash, according to prosecutors.
Some of the doctors wrote more prescriptions for controlled substances in a single month than entire hospitals were writing in that time, the acting director of the FBI, Andrew G. McCabe, said at a news conference, where several federal law enforcement and health care officials announced the prosecutions.
“This event again highlights the enormity of the fraud challenge we face,” Attorney General Jeff Sessions said.
Arrests were made nationwide last week, the Justice Department said. The hundreds of prosecutions were a record for a Medicare fraud task force created a decade ago.
Opioid addiction is an escalating public health crisis. Hydrocodone and oxycodone, two powerful opioids, are among the most commonly abused prescription drugs.
Sessions has emphasized cracking down on drug crime as a priority, directing the nation’s prosecutors in May to be maximally tough in charging such crimes, even when they may carry mandatory minimum prison sentences.
“Thanks to these efforts, fewer criminals will be able to exploit our nation’s opioid crisis for their own gain,” said Tom Price, the secretary of health and human services, citing the Trump administration’s budget request for a $70 million investment in the health care fraud control program as a signal of its commitment to rooting out such crimes.
McCabe described standing-room-only waiting rooms where patients lined up for prescriptions and doctors writing them for addicts and drug dealers in exchange for $250 to $300 in cash.
“I know we overuse certain words in the lexicon like unprecedented and historic and unique,” said Chuck Rosenberg, acting administrator of the Drug Enforcement Administration. “But this is an epidemic.”