The West Miami drug store was called E-Z Pharmacy. A more apt name would have been “E-Z Money.”
The former owners — Eklis Almanza and husband Juan E. Diaz Gonzalez — pocketed $4.8 million from the taxpayer-funded Medicare program by submitting bogus claims for prescription drugs that none of their customers ever needed or received, according to a federal indictment.
In Little Havana, Enemisis Torres is accused of selling forged and altered prescriptions of Medicare patients at her rehabilitation clinic, Palmetto Comprehensive Healthcare, to a ring of Miami-Dade pharmacy owners. They in turn fraudulently billed the federal program $21.2 million, prosecutors say. Her clinic was raided early Thursday.
The defendants are among 73 South Florida suspects charged this week in Miami federal court with bilking Medicare, including dozens accused of defrauding the Part D prescription drug program that was implemented a decade ago during the Bush administration. The total amount of fraudulent claims in the regional sweep: $262 million.
“By stealing from Medicare ... they have robbed all of us,” U.S. Attorney Wifredo Ferrer told reporters Thursday.
The South Florida arrests — carried out by armies of FBI and Health and Human Services agents — are part of this week’s nationwide take-down of 243 Medicare fraud offenders in states across the country, extending to Alaska. The tally of false claims in the nationwide crackdown: $712 million.
The Justice Department in Washington and U.S. attorney's office in Miami held back-to-back news conferences Thursday to spotlight the latest schemes to fleece the Medicare program, which continues to be plagued by billions of dollars in losses to fraud every year.
Ferrer called the latest healthcare fraud take-down the “largest ever” over the past decade, with Miami, the capital of Medicare fraud, accounting for one-third of all defendants charged this week. “It’s unacceptable, staggering and pretty shocking,” he said.
