An Orange County woman pleaded guilty today to submitting more than $2.2 million in fraudulent claims to Medicare for hospice services for beneficiaries who were not terminally ill, on which Medicare paid her company more than $2.1 million.
Lynn Galbraith, 60, of Anaheim, pleaded guilty to one count of health care fraud.
According to her plea agreement, Galbraith was the co-owner and operator of the Garden Grove-based Azure Hospice Care Inc. from September 2019 to July 2022, after which time she became the company’s sole owner until February 2024.
During this time, she knowingly and willfully submitted and caused the submission to Medicare for reimbursement of hospice services for beneficiaries who did not have a terminal illness with a life expectancy of six months or less if the illness ran its normal course.
In submitting the false claims to Medicare, Galbraith either knew the beneficiaries did not qualify for hospice or knew that they did not have sufficient medical records supporting a diagnosis and prognosis that qualified them for hospice benefits. She did not routinely coordinate with the beneficiaries’ primary care physicians about their purported conditions or terminal prognoses.
Galbraith knew and intended that Medicare would rely on her false representations that the patients were eligible for...
Lynn Galbraith, 60, of Anaheim, pleaded guilty to federal health care fraud after improperly billing Medicare more than $2.2 million through Azure Hospice Care. An Orange County woman pleaded gu...