Following accusations of Medicare fraud, FBI agents on January 14 raided Med-Care Diabetic & Medical Supplies; the Florida office of a medical supply firm whose executive vice president Daniel Porush inspired the movie The Wolf of Wall Street.
FBI agents, the Florida fraud department, and local law enforcement officials closed entrances to the building of Med-Care Diabetic & Medical Supplies in Boca Raton, Florida, and were seen removing boxes of files. FBI Spokesman James Marshall declined to comment about the investigation.
Porush inspired the character, Donnie Azoff, portrayed by actor Jonah Hill as Jordan Belfort’s (played by Leonardo DiCaprio) business partner in the Hollywood flick. The movie depicted Wall Street executives who ripped off their clients to fund their decadent lifestyle of prostitutes and drugs.
In 1999, Porush and his partner Belfort were convicted of insider trading, perjury, conspiracy, and money laundering and still owe $200 million to those they scammed. Porush was sentenced to four years in prison, and was released on probation in 2004 after serving 39 months.
In February 2014, a former Med-Care telemarketer, Tiffany Bumbury, filed a lawsuit in federal court in Florida accusing Porush and the company of engaging in Medicare fraud by using telemarketers to sell superfluous medical equipment to patients. In her complaint, Bumbury said Porush and five others encouraged telemarketers to “say whatever they needed to say” to secure a sale. Bumbury sued under the whistleblower provisions of the False Claims Act, which makes it illegal to submit false claims to Medicare. Her lawsuit was dismissed in June 2014 “due to her failure to provide enough evidence to back up her claim”.
This was not the first time that allegations of improper billing were raised about Med-Care. In April 2013, Med-Care was the subject of a hearing held by the Senate Subcommittee on Financial and Contracting Oversight over its marketing and billing practices. Steven Silverman, president of Med-Care, testified at the time that in 2012 Med-Care received around $35 million from Medicare for supplying patients with medical products. The company filed over 600,000 claims and received about $84.5 million in Medicare payments between 2009 and 2012. 68 percent of a sampling of Med-Care claims to Medicare was found to be improper.
Source:
http://rt.com/usa/222751-fbi-medical-supply-raid/
THEY SHOULD LEAVE THIS MAN ALONE ALREADY “WOLF OF WALL STREET”, MED-CARE HELP HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF CHRONICALLY ILL PATIENTS LIVE A BETTER QUALITY OF LIFE BY HANDLING ALL OF THEIR SUPPLIES AND I FIND IT HARD TO BELIEVE NOBODY WOULD THINK TO LOOK AT MEDICARE FOR PAYING FOR UNNECESSARY ITEMS LIKE THIS WHISTLEBLOWER CLAIMS,SO IT SEEMS APPARENT THAT THESE CLAIMS ARE SIMPLY STEMMING FROM A GREEDY DISGRUNTLED EX EMPLOYEE AND HOLD NO VALIDITY.