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"Ragged Dick
opened his eyes slowly, and stared stupidly in the face of the speaker, but did
not offer to get up.
"Wake up, you
young vagabond!" said the man
impatiently.
"I suppose you'd lay there all day, if I hadn't called
you."
Going out into the fresh air Dick felt the pangs of
hunger.
The small boy stepping incautiously to the edge of the boat fell
over into the foaming water.
"My child!" a man exclaimed,"who will save
my child? A thousand - ten thousand dollars to any who will save
him!"
Now Dick, an expert swimmer, immediately dove in.
"Not many
boys would have risked their lives for a stranger," said the
gentleman.
It was the suit of new clothes he wore which made him feel a
little more aristocratic.
He accordingly went to a restaurant for a
substantial supper.
He was no longer Ragged Dick now, but Mr. Richard
Hunter, junior partner in the large firm of Rockwell & Hunter.
Mr.
Greyson felt that even in a worldly way Dick was a good match for his daughter;
but he knew and valued still more his good heart and conscientious fidelity to
duty, and excellent principles, and cheerfully gave his consent.
Last
week I read Dick's marriage in the papers, and rejoiced in his new hopes of
happiness.
So Dick has achieved Fame and Fortune, the fame of an
honorable and enterprising man of business, and a fortune which promises to be
very large.
I am glad to say Dick has not been spoiled by prosperity.
He never forgets his humble beginnings, and tries to show his sense of
goodness by extending a helping hand to the poor and needy boys, whose trials
and privations he understands well from his own past experience." - Horatio
Alger Jr. |
2007
Merck agrees to pay $2.3
billion to the IRS.
The tax dispute stemmed from income attributed to a
partnership set up in Bermuda in 1993 to avoid taxes.
Merck acquired
Medico and gave two patents, for Zocor® and Mevacor®, to it's Bermuda
subsidiary.
Merck then
pays it's subsidiary royalties on the two drugs - in effect deducting income it
had paid itself.
2008
Merck agrees to pay $671 million for
overcharging the government for four popular Medicaid drugs and for bribing
doctors to prescribe Vioxx®,
Zocor®, Mevacor® and Pepcid®.
Investigation triggered in 2000 by
a former Merck salesman with an
itchy conscience who
blew the whistle.
Joseph Roth*, an account manager for
Israel based United Mizrahi
Bank, and rabbi Moshe Zigelman*, admitted to their parts in a tax evasion
scheme in which people made bogus tax-exempt donations to charitable
organizations related to Spinka, an
Orthodox Jewish
sect.
rabbi Moshe Zigelman admitted to soliciting donations by
promising to refund 80% to 95% of the sum.
Joseph Roth admitted he
established secret overseas bank accounts and bogus loans to facilitate the
transfer of funds and charged fees to repatriate the money.
medicare and corporate
fraud
"Many national healthcare plans provide universal
insurance at a lower per-capita cost than the American system with better
results." - JD Hunley
"A jury might think $45 million is fair and just
compensation to the family of the woman who died while hospital personnel
ignored her cries of pain.
The judge will automatically reduce any
possible verdict to $250,000 - the most in non-economic damages anyone can
recover for any injury or death caused by a healthcare provider.
The
cap was passed at the behest of the insurance industry and medical
establishment more than three decades ago.
It has never been changed or
adjusted - even for inflation.
We may be reaching a point at which
letting patients die is more cost-effective than treating them." - Linda
Fermoyle Rice 1980s Under the
Reagan administration International Medical Centers run by George
Recarey expand rapidly due to a special exemption granted through the office of
Jeb Bush.
1987 A federal court jury finds Jorge
Recarey, Mariano Villa Del Rey and Antonio Fernandez Sr. guilty of labor
racketeering charges.
3 CONVICTED OF RACKETEERING
July
1994 National Medical Enterprises agreed to pay $379 million in
criminal fines, civil damages, and penalties for kickbacks and fraud at
National Medical Enterprises
psychiatric and
substance abuse hospitals in more than 30 states.
After this
settlement, National Medical Enterprises renames itself
"Tenet".
October 1996 First American Health
Care of Georgia, Inc, later Integrated Health Services, Inc, agrees
to reimburse the
federal government $255 million for overbilling and making fraudulent
Medicare claims.
First American billed Medicare for costs
unrelated to the care of patients in their homes, including the personal
expenses of senior management, as well as marketing and lobbying expenses.
Epilogue: IHS files for
bankruptcy and never pays
the settlement.
November 1996 Laboratory
Corporation of America Holdings (LabCorp), agrees to pay $182 million to
resolve charges that it submitted false claims for medically unnecessary
laboratory tests to federal and state
health care programs.
The fraud involved bundled lab tests that were billed to Medicare as
free-standing tests, resulting in an eight-fold increase in charges to
Medicare.
March 1997 SmithKline Beecham
Clinical Laboratories Inc. (SBCL), now GlaxoSmith Kline, is ordered to pay
$325 million for filing false claims involving adding on laboratory tests not
requested by doctors and not medically necessary, billing for lab tests that
were not actually performed, giving kickbacks to doctors in order to get
business, and billing Medicare for dialysis testing already paid for by kidney
dialysis centers.
July 1998 Blue Cross Blue
Shield of Illinois (also known as Health Care Service Corporation)
pleeds guilty to eight felony counts and agrees to pay $144 million.
The nature of the fraud is that Blue Cross Blue Shield Illinois
manipulated work samples and falsified reports to the Health Care Finance
Administration in order to conceal evidence of its poor performance as a
federally contracted processor of Medicare claims.
January 2000 Fresenius Medical
Care of North America, the world's largest provider of kidney dialysis
products and services, agreed to pay a fine of $486 million for a scam
involving National Medical Care, Inc. (NMC), a
kidney dialysis
subsidiary owned by Fresenius which included fraudulent and fictitious
blood testing claims by LifeChem, Inc. and fraudulent claims submitted
to Medicare for intradialytic parenteral nutrition (IDPN), a nutritional
therapy provided to patients during dialysis treatments.
February 2000 Beverly Enterprises Inc., the nation's
largest assisted living facility chain, agreed to pay $175 million to resolve
civil and criminal charges that it defrauded Medicare by fabricating Medicare
patient records.
December 2000 HCA The
Healthcare Company (formerly known as Columbia HCA),
the largest for-profit hospital chain in the
US, pleeds guilty to criminal conduct and agrees to pay more than $840
million in criminal fines, civil penalties and damages for unlawful billing
practices.
Fraud included: billing for lab tests not medically
necessary and not ordered by physicians, "upcoding" medical problems in order
to get higher reimbursements for more serious medical issues, billing the
government for advertising under the guise of "community education," and
billing the government for non-reimbursable costs incurred in the purchase of
health agencies around the country.
This agreement does not resolve
allegations that HCA unlawfully charged for the
costs of running its hospitals, and that it paid kickbacks to physicians to get
Medicare and Medicaid patients referred to its facilities.
March 2001 Vencor Inc., one of the nation's largest
assisted living facility chains, and Ventas Inc., a related real estate
investment trust, agreed to pay the US $104.5 million to resolve claims for
failure to provide the promised quality of care to assisted living facility
patients due to inadequate staffing,
improper care of bedsores, and failure to meet resident's basic dietary
needs.
October 2001 Taketa-Abbott
Pharmaceutical Products Inc. agreed to pay $875 million to resolve criminal
charges and civil liabilities in connection with fraudulent drug pricing and
marketing of Lupron®, a drug sold for $500 per dose for the treatment of
prostate cancer under
Medicare Part-A.
2002 Pfizer paid $49 million to settle state and
federal Medicaid fraud charges involving
Lipitor®.
April
2003 Bayer paid
$257,200,000 to settle Medicaid fraud charges involving a "lick and stick"
scheme in which Bayer
sold re-labeled products to an HMO at deeply discounted prices and then
concealed this discount in order to avoid rebating the government .
June 2003 AstraZeneca agreed to pay
$355,000,000 for providing free drug samples to doctors and telling them to
bill Medicare and Medicaid hundreds of dollars per sample.
HCA
agreed to pay $631 million in civil penalties and damages arising from false
claims, including cost report fraud and the payment of kickbacks to physicians,
submitted to Medicare and other federal health programs.
July 2003 CG Nutritionals, Inc. pled guilty to
obstructing a criminal investigation and defrauding the Medicare and Medicaid
programs and agreed to pay $400 million to resolve civil claims. In addition,
the subsidiary of Abbott Labs, CG Nutritionals, Inc., agreed to a
criminal fine of $200 million in relation to the sale of products which pump
special foods into the stomachs and digestive systems of patients who are not
able to ingest meals in a normal manner.
2003
GlaxoSmithKline
signed a corporate
integrity agreement and paid $88 million in a civil fine for overcharging
Medicaid for the
antidepressant, Paxil® and
nasal allergy spray, Flonase®. |
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