On a busy, gritty street in suburban Los Angeles, the white one-story stucco building looked like any other. Among the apartments, offices, sidewalk bodegas, the only defining feature was the building’s door – a thick, solid slab of dark oak with a small, security grill about six inches square.
“Is Dr. Faustina here,” I asked. “This is his address of record with the medical board.”
A face appeared in the cutout, “He doesn’t work here.”
That’s odd, I thought, considering multiple home healthcare agencies at this address had billed Medicare more than $40 million dollars using 87-year-old Dr. Gilbert Faustina’s Medicare number, according to federal records.
Yet as multiple state and federal audits have shown, healthcare fraud in Los Angeles is big business, with taxpayer losses estimated at $3.5 billion.
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What happened in California is not unique, but the scope of it is. Ghost patients, sham companies, offshore owners and corrupt doctors. Los Angeles County alone has 1,923 hospice providers. That’s more than 36 states combined and 33 times more than either Florida’s 58 or New York’s 40.