High crime, checkbook punishment
For the umpteenth time, there’s an effective way to stop this. For the umpteenth time, don’t hold your breath.
The Tennessee-based parent company of skilled-nursing and assisted-living facilities with four sites in Georgia has agreed to a $145 million settlement with the Department of Justice for allegedly defrauding U.S. taxpayers (that’s us) out of millions in government reimbursements.
As reported in the Atlanta Business Chronicle, Life Care Centers of America and its owner Forrest Preston have settled with the government in a DOJ lawsuit alleging that the company filed millions in false Medicare and Tricare claims between 2006 and 2013. Tricare, as many in this community are well aware, is a health benefits program for present and former members of the armed services and their families.
Here’s how the Chronicle explains the operation: Reimbursement is based on a daily rate according to required care skills and patient needs. The “ultra-high” category indicates the highest level of care, and of course is reimbursed at the highest rate.
The government complaint alleged that “corporate-wide policies and practices” at Life Care designated people for that level regardless of their needs, with the result that some patients received treatment they didn’t need, or were kept in care longer than they needed to be, or both.
Such conduct, said U.S. Attorney Nancy Stallard Harr, “not only undermines the viability of those programs, [but] exploits our most vulnerable citizens.”
The penalty is the latest “record” financial settlement for corporate wrongdoing, in this case the largest ever assessed a health care chain of this kind.
It also — surely to nobody’s surprise — ties a record (shared by thousands) for fewest actual human beings held criminally accountable for sucking away sums of money all the thieves in a state’s prison population couldn’t combine for.
This, remember, is for systematic fraud the government maintains was a matter of company-wide policy and practice.
It’s become a timeworn chorus, but it’s one Americans need to keep singing, and loudly, until somebody in authority finally listens: This kind of arrogant larceny is the result of conscious decisions made and consciously carried out by real people, not by lines on a stock index. Those people have names and, in anything approaching a just culture, some degree of accountability. (“Personal responsibility” should mean something more than what we smugly claim welfare mothers need more of.)
Those names need to be named and those responsibilities pinpointed. It’s not enough — it has never been enough, will never be enough — to make them pay with their (or, more often than not, their non-complicit shareholders’) money. Until those real people with real names are treated as “real” criminals and made to pay with their freedom, we won’t even put a dent in this kind of nonsense. The risk-reward ratio is nowhere near steep enough.
This story was originally published October 25, 2016 at 4:47 PM with the headline "High crime, checkbook punishment."