Yahoo – AFP,
July 13, 2017
Washington
(AFP) - US authorities announced charges Thursday against more than 400 people,
many of them doctors and nurses, over health care scams worth $1.3 billion
including the wrongful prescription and distribution of opioids.
The Justice
Department called it the largest ever enforcement action of its kind and said
120 of the 412 defendants had been charged with opioid-related crimes.
Providing
details on some of the scams, Attorney General Jeff Sessions said a rehab
clinic in Palm Beach, Florida, for instance, allegedly recruited opioid addicts
with gift cards, visits to strip clubs and even drugs. This allowed the clinic
to bill for more than $58 million in false treatment and tests, said Sessions.
And a
clinic in Houston allegedly sold prescriptions for opioids in exchange for
cash, with one doctor there giving out prescriptions for more than two million
doses, Sessions said.
"While
today is a historic day, the department's work is certainly not finished. In
fact, it is just beginning," Sessions said.
The barely
controlled pumping of hundreds of millions of doses of opioids into US
communities during the past decade is blamed for a sharp surge in addiction and
overdose deaths which totaled an estimated 60,000 last year.
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