A Houston medical center agreed last week to pay over $21 million to the federal government to settle alleged false Medicare claims submitted after procedures weren’t covered or that were performed so poorly the procedures were deemed “worthless.”
Cornerstone Healthcare Group Holding Inc. billed alleged claims to Medicare for services performed by unqualified and unlicensed medical students, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Texas said in a news release.
Houston agencies tell felons with guns ‘clean it up’ or face federal charges as apart of joint initiative Cornerstone Hospital Medical Center, a former long-term acute care facility that operated as a long-term care hospital until 2020, violated state and federal law by submitting the claims while knowing that unlicensed and unauthorized foreign students of Drs. Jorge Guerrero, Joel Joselevitz and Joseph Varon illegally performed these medical procedures, the release said.
The FBI in Houston and other federal agencies began investigating Cornerstone in 2018 after a whistleblower lawsuit.