The Department of Justice on Wednesday charged nearly two dozen individuals for allegedly defrauding the federal government’s pandemic relief programs, saying the schemes resulted in nearly $150 million in false billings and theft.
The charges span nine federal districts and range in both scope and scale, federal officials said in a release. In several cases, defendants are accused of offering blood or saliva COVID-19 tests to patients only to turn around to “submit false and fraudulent claims to Medicare for unrelated, medically unnecessary, and far more expensive tests or services,” the DOJ alleges.
One such case out of California concerned owners of a clinical laboratory who allegedly submitted hundreds of millions of dollars in false billing claims for COVID tests. The DOJ charged Imran Shams and Lourdes Navarro with conspiracy to commit health care fraud, conspiracy to pay and payment of illegal kickbacks and bribes, false statements to Medicare and money laundering for allegedly billing Medicare for unneeded tests and offering kickbacks to individuals who helped obtain specimens and test orders.
Six separate cases came from California, including at least three in which individuals were charged with creating various kinds of false COVID-19 testing and vaccine documentation. In another case, 53-year-old Robert Van Camp was charged in Washington for allegedly producing and selling blank vaccination cards to individuals in at least 12 states.
Van Camp allegedly told an...
A front-page article with the byline of veteran New York Times opinion writer Nicholas Kristof is the latest poisonous example of what I call the NGO “halo effect.” Headlined “The Silence That Mee...