The owner of a home health agency in the region of Dallas has been sentenced to seventeen years in prison for his role in the largest home health care fraud scheme of nation in history—an almost $400 million scam, the Justice Department declared on the day of Tuesday.
Wilbert James Veasey, Jr., 65, was sentenced to 210 months in federal prison and ordered to pay more than $23 million in restitution to Medicare and more than $500,000 to Medicaid. Veasey, along with various others involved in the scheme, was found guilty previous year. He has been in custody since early the year of 2016.
Veasey, along with co-defendants Jacques Roy, M.D., 59; Cynthia Stiger, 54; and Charity Eleda, 56, were each convicted on one count of conspiracy to commit home health care fraud. Roy was also convicted on 8 counts of health care fraud; Veasey was convicted of an extra three counts and Eleda on 4 counts. Three other defendants in the case pleaded guilty for their roles in the scheme, serving time ranging from one to 3 years, and were ordered to pay $25 million in restitution.
The group involved in a “large-scale, sophisticated home health care fraud scheme,” involving companies they owned—Medistat Group Associated, P.A., Apple of Your Eye Health Care Services, Inc., Ultimate Care Home Health Services and Charry Home Care Services.
As part of the scam, Veasey and others recruited people with Medicare benefits to sign up for Medicare home health care services. Eleda also recruited sufferers from a Dallas homeless shelter, sometimes paying recruiters up to $50 per beneficiary that was instructed to her vehicle parked outside the gates of shelter. Eleda and other nurses also falsified medical documents and prepared plans of care that weren’t medically important.
Dr. Roy’s fraud scope was “massive,” in accordance with the government, as he signed off on care plans and visited patients, performed unimportant home visits and ordered unnecessary medical services for recruited beneficiaries. His company, Medistat, processed and approved care plans for 11,000 unique Medicare beneficiaries for more than 500 different home health agencies.
The case was inquired by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office of Inspector General (OIG) and the Texas Attorney General’s Medicaid Fraud Control Unit.
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