After initially pleading not guilty last year, a local woman pleaded guilty last week to defrauding insurers out of more than $7 million for COVID-19 testing that never happened.
Connie Jo Clampitt and her partner, lab technician Terrance Barnard, were indicted in December for healthcare fraud. Clampitt admitted to fraudulently billing insurance companies more than $30 million and receiving $7 million in reimbursements for fake COVID-19 tests.
The flow of federal and state dollars dispersed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic has been fertile ground for fraud. A CEO was indicted for making claims about procuring COVID-19 tests in the early days of the pandemic, a lab owner pleaded guilty to bundling COVID-19 tests with other medically unnecessary lab tests and billed to Medicare, and scammers are calling Medicare recipients and offering free COVID-19 tests to get their Medicare information to bill it for other services fraudulently.
Between March 2021 and April 2022, Clampitt admitted to conspiring with Bernard and others to defraud several major insurance companies, including Blue Cross Blue Shield, Cigna, United Healthcare, Humana, and Molina Healthcare. She admitted to controlling and operating TC Diagnostics, ME Diagnostics, and PHR Diagnostics with Bernard and purported them to be advanced labs with diagnostic testing abilities for COVID-19.
She admitted in court documents that these entities were shell companies that never operated labs with COVID-19 testing...
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