BUSTED!!!! Medicare scandal rocks two Los Angeles Hospitals

WE have seen this happening all over skid row. People set up near homeless missions to recruit those with medicare and medi-cal cards. I have been approached. It is a horrible thing knowing that there are those out there defrauding tax payers and using the sick to get and make money. I am now wondering when they have said at local hospitals, that their beds are full, how many of really sick and ill have been turned away while the hospitals milk the system.

The people arrested were those high ranking administrators of the two hospitals.

"This is a rather large operation. They were receiving kickbacks up to $20,000 a month from some of these hospitals and they were delivering between 30 and 50 patients a month," said Frank Mateljan, a spokesman for the city attorney's office.

Mitts ran the 7th Street Assessment Center, which screens people for health needs and takes them to hospitals if necessary.

The lawsuit said the "patients" were picked up by recruiters who sent them to the 7th Street center, where they were given a phony diagnosis and forms were filled out justifying their eligibility for government medical programs.

Medi-Cal and Medicare would be billed for the ambulance and hospital stay, Mateljan said.

After their hospital stays, the homeless patients would be returned to Skid Row shelters, but "they would go back multiple times," he said.

In one case, the suit said, a mentally ill woman said she had been admitted to all three hospitals in the past four years, including at least six times to Los Angeles Metropolitan. The woman, identified only as "Recruit X," was diagnosed at the assessment center with conditions such as "shortness of breath" or "chest pains" that she never had, and was given little treatment, none of which was necessary, the complaint contended.

She frequently used the money she received for participating in the scheme to buy crack cocaine, the suit said.

Those of us living in skid row are well aware of those who come here to prey on the sick and the weak and those who are struggling with addictions. There is a big fight going on in the neighborhood council right now over why the neighborhood council is doling out 2500 dollars to a program called Project Homeless Connect. Those participating in this project, which has been happening every fall for going on three years ,are the huge non profits in skid row. Yet , they are getting money from the Downtown Los Angeles Neighborhood Council. With the hundreds of millions of dollars that these social service providers receive in funding every year ,they are getting money from the neighborhood council? Some residents in skid row are wanting to know where that money is going and it always crosses my mind "What kind of scheme is being perpetrated?" I am sure it crosses other people's minds in skid row. It is a never ending creation of non-profit after non-profit in skid row, yet there is not an end in sight to the conditions of homelessness.

There is money to be had because of the existence of skid row and, as long as we as a society allow skid row to exist as it is, these schemers , using your tax dollars ,will continue to take that money away from the truly needy to put into their own pockets.