Mississippi hospice owner ordered to pay $5M restitution
The owner of a hospice in Cleveland has been ordered to pay over $5 million in restitution for Medicare and Medicaid fraud.
Andre Kirkland was sentenced in U.S. District Court in Oxford on Sept. 1 on charges that he defrauded Medicare and Medicaid by signing up patients for hospice care who were not terminally ill, U.S. Attorney Gregory K. Davis announced Wednesday.
Kirkland, 52, who owned and operated Revelation Hospice in Clarksdale, pled guilty on May 4 to conspiracy to commit health care fraud. U.S. District Judge Michael Mills sentenced Kirkland to serve 48 months in home confinement in lieu of imprisonment because of recurrent metastatic cancer, which requires substantial medical care. Kirkland was also ordered to pay restitution in the amount of $5,400,843.50 to Medicare and $66,171.43 to Medicaid.
The investigation revealed that Kirkland and Revelation Hospice were knowingly enrolling non-hospice eligible Medicaid and Medicare recipients and then filing false hospice claims to Medicaid and Medicare for services that were not medically necessary or were not ever provided. Kirkland, as a registered nurse and Revelation’s Director of Nursing, personally admitted non-hospice appropriate Medicaid and Medicare recipients into Revelation and deceived the patients about the true nature of the services in which they were being enrolled. As part of this deception, many patients unknowingly signed Do Not Resuscitate forms along with undated hospice revocation forms. Kirkland would later use the revocation forms to discharge patients from Revelation Hospice without the patient’s knowledge.
Read more: http://www.clarionledger.com/story/news/2016/09/14/mississippi-hospice-owner-restitution/90373484/
= new reply since forum marked as read
