Gen Xers and Millennials tend to have a pessimistic view of whether the Social Security program and Medicare will run out of money when they need it. One way to address that concern would be to put an end to the billions and billions of dollars that are stolen from the fund each year. In other words, quit voting for Democrats who take a soft-on-fraud-and-corruption stance every time.
You want your government to arrest these thieves, which is what happened to Khalid Satary, who was indicted and charged with ripping off Medicare to the tune of $547 million between 2016 and 2019. That’s an average of $182 million per year. Nice work if you can get it, right?
The feds arrested Satary, a 54-year-old foreign national, on July 20 on allegations that he conspired with patient recruiters, telemarketing call centers, and telemedicine companies to use deceptive marketing programs and illegal kickbacks and bribes, all to generate cancer genetic (CGx) test samples that earned reimbursements that totaled from $10,000 to $20,000 per sample.
That earned him a spot on the FBI Most Wanted Fraudsters list. Before his capture, Satary was believed to have been hiding out in Dubai.
Satary had owned and operated a number of diagnostic testing laboratories throughout the United States, most notably Georgia, Louisiana, and Oklahoma, which allegedly billed the Medicare Program for those expensive and medically unnecessary CGx tests.
On Sept. 26, 2019, he was indicted in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana, New Orleans. That’s where he was charged with conspiracy to commit healthcare fraud and wire fraud, healthcare fraud, conspiracy to defraud the United States and to pay and receive illegal healthcare kickbacks and bribes, and conspiracy to launder monetary instruments.
According to the FBI, “Satary was released on bond with conditions to not work in the healthcare field. While on bond, Satary allegedly conspired with Houston-based laboratories in Texas to submit fraudulent genetic testing claims to Medicare.”
“This defendant allegedly orchestrated a massive fraud scheme that preyed on thousands of elderly patients, deceiving them into undergoing expensive, medically unnecessary tests and fraudulently billing the government for more than half a billion dollars,” said Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche.
The labs involved in the alleged scam included Performance Laboratories in Oklahoma, Lazarus Services in Louisiana, and Clio Labs in Georgia. These three lab companies billed Medicare, collectively, more than $547 million.
As part of the scheme, the scammers would solicit CGx tests from vulnerable elderly and disabled Medicare enrollees through telemarketing outreach and “health fairs.”
According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), “The tests were then approved by telemedicine doctors who did not engage in treatment and often did not even speak with the enrollees for whom they ordered tests.”
Footing the bill for all of this was the U.S. taxpayer.
The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has said that this case is one of the largest health care fraud schemes it ever charged. In that original 2019 indictment, the DOJ reported that it charged 35 people who it said were responsible for $2.1 billion in losses.
Satary is the alleged ringleader. The feds issued an arrest warrant for Satary on Nov. 23, 2022, after he allegedly violated the terms of his pre-trial release. When he failed to appear at his Dec. 12, 2022 court date, it was clear he had fled the country, and that’s when the Biden administration’s DOJ then declared him a fugitive of justice.
When he was found and captured in the Middle East on July 20, authorities found on his person a fake Mexican passport under a fake name. At that point, he was transferred to U.S. custody.
On July 21, Satary appeared in court in the Eastern District of Virginia, where he is charged with conspiracy to commit healthcare fraud and wire fraud, healthcare fraud, conspiracy to defraud the United States and to pay and receive illegal healthcare kickbacks and bribes, and conspiracy to commit money laundering.
“If convicted, he faces a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison for the counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering, 10 years in prison for the counts of healthcare fraud and conspiracy to commit health care fraud, and five years in prison for the count of conspiracy to defraud the United States and to pay and receive kickbacks,” the DOJ said in a statement.
Given what we've been seeing in cases like this and in states like Minnesota, just stopping the fraud will go a long way towards making sure Social Security and Medicare are there for Americans when they need it. Keep this in mind and at the ready the next time one of your leftist friends complains that Social Security will be gone by the time they reach retirement age.
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