Wednesday, December 6, 2017

Very Brief Blog: Old School Lab Fraud: Strip clubs and bags of cash in NJ

A few years ago, I was talking to a senior lab industry colleague about trends in Medicare fraud.  Old school, I said, was giving the physician a brown paper bag full of $50 bills.   New school, was having the physician enrolled as a "consultant" for a "registry" and giving him $200 per head or some other figure.  (See 2014 OIG bulletin here).    My colleague said, "Well, there's still plenty of the Old School approach, in New Jersey."  Total earnings of the lab were >$100M during its run.

For a colorful article on the colorful and seamy side of the clinical chemistry business, see a December 5, 2017 article in New Jersey Dot Com, here.  (Medicare payments to the lab were only $2.1M in 2015, available via here; but that's 2 years after initial arrests made in 2013; BCBS cases against the lab dated to 2009).