Posts Tagged ‘Insurance’

Chesterfield Psychiatrist Admits Health Care Fraud

Monday, November 21st, 2022

Dr. Franco Sicuro, a psychiatrist from Chesterfield, Missouri, pleaded guilty November 15, 2022 to a felony conspiracy charge and admitted that Medicare, Medicaid and other insurers lost more than $3.8 million based on fraudulent reimbursement claims submitted by clinical laboratories that he owned.

Sicuro was associated with various health care businesses including Millennium Psychiatric Associates, Advanced Geriatric Management, Centrec Care, Sleep Consultants of St. Louis, Midwest Toxicology Group, Genotec Dx and Benemed Diagnostics.

Criminal Fraud is rampant in the psychiatric industry. Psychiatric membership bodies do not police this criminality. Instead, as former president of the American Psychiatric Association (APA), Paul Fink, arrogantly admitted, “It is the task of the APA to protect the earning power of psychiatrists.”

The mental health monopoly has practically zero accountability and zero liability for its failures. This has allowed psychiatrists to commit far more than just financial fraud, such as repeated allegations of physical and sexual abuse involving patients in various psychiatric facilities.

The primary purpose of mental health treatment must be the therapeutic care and treatment of individuals who are suffering emotional disturbance. It must never be the financial or personal gain of the practitioner.

Experience has shown that there are many criminal mental health practitioners. If you become aware of such, file a fraud report here: https://www.cchr.org/take-action/report-psychiatric-abuse.html.

What is needed is legislation that provides not only more effective oversight but also stronger accountability measures: criminal and civil penalties, removal from CMS programs (Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services) and their funding, and hospital closure where systemic abuse is found. Only such a comprehensive solution can begin to thwart the level of abuse, fraud and malpractice that is so widespread today in the for-profit mental health industry. Contact your local, state and federal representatives and express your opinions about this.

Doctor Pleads Guilty to Mental Health Care Fraud

Monday, November 7th, 2022

A Stratford, Connecticut internist pleaded guilty November 3, 2022 in Hartford federal court to health care fraud and kickback offenses.

Dr. Ananthakumar Thillainathan, 44, a citizen of Sri Lanka and owner and president of MDCareNow LLC, a medical practice with offices in Stratford and Milford, submitted to Connecticut Medicaid over $800,000 in fraudulent claims for psychotherapy services that he knew patients did not receive.

Thillainathan submitted fraudulent claims to Medicaid that falsely represented his employees had rendered 60-minute psychotherapy sessions when, in fact, his employees only had very brief conversations with patients, had only left a voicemail for patients, or had no contact with patients at all.

This news shows that mental health care fraud is being perpetrated not only by psychiatrists but also by non-psychiatric medical doctors engaged in mental health care.

The fact is, mental health care fraud in the U.S. is estimated to be up to $20 billion per year. There should be no place for criminal intent or deed in the field of mental health.

There are as many types of mental health insurance fraud as the criminal mind can invent. For example, a U.S. congressional committee issued a report estimating that Community Mental Health Centers (CMHCs) had diverted between $40 million to $100 million to improper uses. Various CMHCs had built tennis courts and swimming pools with their federal construction grants and, in one instance, used a federal staff grant to hire a lifeguard and swimming instructor. [Reference: Rael Isaac and Virginia Armat, Madness in the Streets, (The Free Press, New York, 1990), p. 98.]

The primary purpose of mental health treatment must be the therapeutic care and treatment of individuals who are suffering emotional disturbance. It must never be the financial or personal gain of the practitioner. Those suffering are inevitably vulnerable and impressionable. Proper treatment therefore demands the highest level of trustworthiness and integrity in the practitioner.

Experience has shown that there are many criminal mental health practitioners. If you become aware of such, file a report about this fraud here: https://www.cchr.org/take-action/report-psychiatric-abuse.html.

The Cloward-Piven Strategy

Wednesday, December 10th, 2014

The Cloward-Piven Strategy

The Cloward–Piven strategy is a political strategy outlined in 1966 by American sociologists and political activists Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven that called for overloading the U.S. public welfare system in order to precipitate a crisis that would lead to a replacement of the welfare system with a national system of a guaranteed annual income and thus “an end to poverty.”

[Cloward, Richard; Piven, Frances (May 2, 1966). “The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty”. (Originally published in The Nation)]

You heard that right. The idea is to drastically increase the ranks of people on government welfare, crash the welfare system and force it to be replaced by — another government welfare system for everyone.

As Cloward and Piven put it, the ultimate objective of this strategy is to wipe out poverty by establishing a guaranteed annual income. In order to precipitate this crisis, the poor must obtain more and more welfare benefits until the system is overloaded.

This is just another suppressive way of redistributing income through the federal government.

Another part of the strategy is that welfare advocacy “must be supplemented by organized demonstrations to create a climate of militancy that will overcome the invidious and immobilizing attitudes which many potential recipients hold toward being ‘on welfare.'”

In other words, let’s create a dangerous environment so that people lose their natural inclination to be self-sufficient and hook them on government welfare.

“To generate an expressly political movement, cadres of aggressive organizers would have to come from the civil rights movement and the churches, …” Are you starting to see a pattern here with recent riots and demonstrations, largely fomented by people sent in from outside the affected community?

They go on to say, “By crisis, we mean a publicly visible disruption in some institutional sphere. Crisis can occur spontaneously (e.g., riots) or as the intended result of tactics of demonstration and protest which either generate institutional disruption or bring unrecognized disruption to public attention.”

Are you getting it yet? Do we really need to name Ferguson? Roughly a quarter of those rioters arrested were not residents of Missouri. One report has it that, “The real story out of Ferguson is that a national network of agitators is ready, on a moment’s notice, to arrive on the scene to cause violence and mayhem.”

Do you know how much “mental health care” and psychiatric drugs are a part of this plot, given that these drugs incite violence and aggression as a “side effect?” Hint — the Missouri Department of Mental Health’s budget is over $1.8 billion per year. Medicaid claims for psychotropic drugs are well over 60 million per year, over 2 million claims per year in Missouri; Medicaid payments for psychotropic drugs are over $6 billion per year, and over $174 million per year in Missouri.

Missouri Medicaid (called MO HealthNet) covers 1 out of every 7 Missourians and 38% of Missouri’s children. Roughly 30% of Missouri’s total annual budget goes to Medicaid; but this only covers 50% of Medicaid spending — the other 50% comes from the federal government. 15% of the Medicaid budget goes to pharmacy services; 15% goes to mental health services. And of course the Affordable Care Act allows for the expansion of eligibility for Medicaid — a key part of Cloward-Piven, expanding access to welfare; although at this time Missouri has not yet expanded MO HealthNet eligibility.

Psychotropic drugs represent roughly 30% of all pharmaceutical spending, and the cost appears to increase roughly 20% per year.

The implementation of the Affordable Care Act is expected to add 2.7 percent, or $7.3 billion, to the level of Mental Health and Substance Abuse spending in 2020, as an expected 25 million people who were previously uninsured gain health insurance coverage.

Well, as we looked back on these statistics, we nearly fell off of our soapbox in shock. What to do? Contact your local, state and federal officials and express your alarm. Write a Letter to the Editor. Contact your employer, your school, your church, your family, friends, and associates. Show them a CCHR DVD documentary (we’ll mail you one if you promise to show it around.) Forward this newsletter and suggest they subscribe. Vote!

Find Out! Fight Back!