Six Detroit area doctors indicted in $500M health care fraud

Wow! Now it makes sense how Dr. Rajendra Bothra was well connected in the Indian Bollywood industry. I personally recall big Bollywood stars opting to stay over his house during their US trip instead of a local 5 star hotel...mind you, this was back in late 90s. I hadn't heard of him in a while thinking he might've retired or died. This is a shocker that they're taking him down while in his retirement. Feds do not kid around!

&gt; <i>&quot;The damage that opioid distribution has done to our community and to the United States as a whole has been devastating&quot; said U.S. Attorney Schneider</i><p>I guess scapegoat big pharma is successfully finding their own scapegoats!<p>The feds could straightforwardly address the fentanyl problem by deillegalizing opiods, allowing reputable distribution to take over. And then society could maturely deal with addiction as a personal medical problem. But I guess it&#x27;s easier to keep hanging it all on personal responsibility and let that DEA&#x2F;CIA gravy train continue rolling.

&gt; Officials said the defendants prescribed opioid medications to induce patients to visit the office, then in order to get them, they had to undergo ancillary services, including painful facet joint and facet block injections.<p>This is disgusting on so many levels.<p>If this is true I hope they throw the book at all of them and anyone else involved as well.

Ugh. I’m going on for surgery next Thursday, for a laparoscopic partial colon resection, and one of the things I’m most worried about will be post-surgery pain killers. Hearing stories about excessive pain killer use and prescription really make me want to avoid them, but on the other hand I’ll need to be up &amp; moving around ASAP to speed my recovery, and pain would get in the way of that.

If true, $500M of fraud (over only 5 years!) is hard to fathom considering it is a small clinic. I&#x27;m wondering how it wasn&#x27;t discovered before it got to this level. You&#x27;d think that even $100M would have set off alarms somewhere.

Bloomfield Hills and Birmingham... doesn&#x27;t surprise me. This isn&#x27;t really fair to associate with Detroit either. These are suburbs 30+ minutes outside of the city.

It&#x27;s been years since I have worked in this space, but, at the time, my group was charged with finding fraud committed by the providers and beneficiaries.<p>It was interesting work: we had data tapes shipped from CMS to us, we loaded the data into a Sybase database, and then used an analysis tool (which I can&#x27;t recall the name of) to look for patterns of fraud - again, this was what now seems like a lifetime ago.<p>Is anyone currently working detecting Medicare and Medicaid fraud?

I&#x27;m a little confused - so if the docs &quot;just gives narcotics without considering alternatives&quot;, then that&#x27;s supposed to be WRONG and encouraging addiction. But if the doc feels other potentially beneficial treatments such as facet joint injections should be tried first, then they are accused of coercing the patient into an unnecessary procedure, essentially bribing then with narcotics. Damned if you do and damned if you don&#x27;t...

As a Detroiter I&#x27;m not surprised in the least bit. It seems yearly that some a&#x27;hole doctor is in the news for doing something terrible.

&gt; It is alleged that between 2013-2018, the following doctors engaged in illegally prescribing controlled substances and fraudulent health care billings:<p>This breaks the rule about not breaking the law while breaking the law.

If anyone read Confessions of an Rx Drug Pusher, it&#x27;s pretty easy to see why most doctors will never advise against pain killers. The incentive to write more prescriptions is just too high. Also fentanyl is super scary

It took this long :( it&#x27;s scary how long it takes to prosecute! I am sure the lobby determines some of this latency ..

Wow,that’s a huge amount of fraud. If they get convicted they may never see the outside of a prison again.