”After entering a rehab facility, 85% of recovering drug addicts will relapse within a year, according to the American Addiction Centers….corrupt rehab centers…bank on that statistic for financial gain.”-vice.com. 10/10/18.
In South Florida: According to a veteran sober house owner, Adam Jasinski: “These places were holding barns for kids to wait ‘til they relapsed,” he said of sober living homes that make shady deals with treatment centers.”…”so the unscrupulous people would ease that process along. They’d come through with a bag of dope, get your dirty urine, and then sell you for $2,000. bucks.”-Vice.com. 10/10/18.
“Some of the more prominent forms that these corrupt practices in addiction treatment have taken:”
1. Patient Brokering. Lead selling. Paying brokers a per head finders fee or kickback for referring patients to their treatment facility;” usually $500-$1000. per patient, or more. This happens with new patients, agreements between sober houses and treatment centers, or between two separate treatment centers.
“Lead buying: When treatment centers bid for patient referrals and leads. Call centers are set up to generate commission based on their number of placed referrals; with call center agents, posing as caregivers, and unbeknownst to the patient, auctioning off the patient to the highest bidding treatment center. Treatment facilities that appear as separate actually may all route to the same call center.”-recoveryanswers.org.
“Patient brokering often entails what is called addiction tourism,” which is the practice of sending a patient out of their home state to receive treatment at a facility in a different state. “
2. “Patient enticement.” Unethically incentivizing patients to enter, stay or switch addiction treatment facilities through money, gifts, free rent, flights, food and other amenities.”
3. “Listing theft. The hijacking of Google business listings. Going into an organizational profile and change listed phone numbers to reroute calls….to other treatment programs or call centers and change listed addresses to deceive patients of their actual location.”
4. “Misrepresentation of services. When treatment facilities deny their affiliations…or inaccurately portray the services they provide; their status of accreditation, the types of conditions they treat, the credentials of their clinical staff…or misrepresent their facilities…”
5. Patient privacy violations. Common practice to share a patients health information outside of the patients health care team, without patients consent or medical necessity.
6. Insurance over billing. Billing insurance companies excessively for unnecessary treatment or services. Commonly done are urine drug tests, “where $10. drug tests were conducted every 2 days and billed at $1,000. or more per test, to insurance.”
7. Insurance fraud. Patients unknowingly “are enrolled in insurance plans utilizing false addresses to take advantage of the “change of address” exception; unknowingly signed up to premium insurance plans…to reimburse the treatment center at a higher rate…”-recoveryanswers.org.
Fortunately, the crooks are starting to pay the price. “The cofounder and former CEO of a Bucks County, Pa. drug rehab firm was sentenced to 3 years in federal prison…for spearheading a wide ranging fraud scheme that made millions illegally, profiting from the struggles of patients it had pledged to help…he accepted kickbacks from lab operators and illegally bought insurance for dozens of addicted patients so that he and his partners could profit from frequent, medically unnecessary and expensive drug screenings.”-inquirer.com. 8/17/20.
Another: “Father and son from Inland Empire must pay $26.7 million for drug rehab fraud.”…restitution and do time in federal prison, for fraudulently signing up addicts for health insurance and getting kickbacks from treatment centers in California.” The centers “paid the client’s insurance premiums,” arranged to have people “transported to California and admitted into expensive treatment centers. In exchange, those centers paid father and son, as much as $7,500. per patient. The centers then went on to bill insurers thousands of dollars for treatment and expensive lab tests each week.”-ocregister.com. 2/25/21.
Conclusion: There’s only one conclusion and it is obvious. Human beings are cattle, being steered into, by the sober houses, brokers, intermediaries, court orders, sometimes traded, into treatment centers. There are so many filthy hands in this business, which gives the topical appearance of actually wanting to help an addicted person. The basis of any business is a repeat customer and the higher the failure rate, the better for the rehab business to potentially get and keep the cattle in the corral. The saddest part of all this is, the addict doesn’t actually get the help that they need. That they’re just a commodity being used by the rehab business, as a money maker, and nobody cares. When will Judges, lawyers, society, people who have survived this horror, band together, wake up, and finally realize the truth and do something about it ? / Done
