DOJ busts $900 million health insurance fraud
A $900 million theft of taxpayer money was revealed Wednesday by the Justice Department, which charged 300 people with defrauding Medicare and other government health care programs, including those for veterans.
One of the criminal complaints noted a CBS News investigation.
Federal prosecutors allege Tricare, the health insurance for active duty military and their families, was hit for nearly $185 million.
Custom compounded creams for pain and scars were aggressively marketed to the military. Tricare paid almost $2 billion for them last year.
One of the doctors referenced in the court papers -- but not charged -- is Dr. Paul Bolger, who wrote CBS News prescriptions for compounded creams ordered over the internet, without performing an exam or even talking to anyone on the phone.
When CBS News visited Dr. Bolger's weight loss clinic in Davenport, Iowa last year, he agreed to answer a few questions.
When asked if he was doing something wrong, Bolger said: "I couldn't disagree with that."
"I'm not going to make excuses for what I was doing," he said. "It's not that I had bad intentions, it was that I was under the mistaken impression that patients such as yourself were being spoken with."
Following the original CBS News report, Bolger was fined $10,000 by the Iowa Board of Medicine for writing prescriptions without seeing patients.
He is under investigation by the Pentagon's Defense Criminal Investigative Service.
