Nineteen defendants, including a home health agency, are facing criminal charges following an investigation into healthcare fraud in Pennsylvania, officials announced Tuesday. During a news conference, state and federal officials announced that the defendants had been charged in connection with h ealthcare schemes that targeted Pennsylvania’s Medicaid program, which resulted in more than $4 million in fraudulent claims. “The great fraud against the American taxpayer takes many forms,” said U.S. Attorney David Metcalf. “It is outrageous and unacceptable that anyone could steal money by billing nonexistent home care services for caregivers who were, in fact, dead, in prison, or trafficking drugs.” Assistant Attorney General for the National Fraud Enforcement Division Colin McDonald said 18 of the 19 defendants were charged in the last 12 days. “Used properly by honest citizens, the program allows those with physical ailments to be cared for by those they trust the most, but infiltrated by greedy and deceitful opportunists, this program becomes a money tree, a gravy train for criminal fraudsters,” McDonald said. According to McDonald, the criminal cases announced Tuesday were not the result of paperwork mistakes or good-faith accounting errors. Instead, he said, those involved billed Medicaid for home care services that were never actually provided. “We charged two home health aides and two purported patients with causing over $400,000 in false claims to Medicaid for services the aides supposedly performed when they were actually hospitalized, working at other jobs and even in jail,” McDonald said. “Yes, the allegations include a scheme that billed taxpayers for home care services provider provided when the person supposedly doing that work was sitting behind bars. That, of course, is not health care. It’s just pure theft.” McDonald said another case involves a father and son in which the father is accused of working as a rideshare and food delivery driver during the times he was supposedly receiving in-home care. “On another occasion, on the very day that the son billed Medicaid for a full day of in-home care for his father. The father was not home at all. He was in a courtroom watching a different relative get sentenced for defrauding this same program,” he said. During the news conference, officials also announced that the Northeast Strike Force team is expanding to Philadelphia, and will included fraud prosecutors to further “root out the fraud” in the state. “This district has a long-standing tradition of not only prosecuting egregious frauds like the ones charged today, but also a history of excellent corporate enforcement, both civilly and criminally,” McDonald said. ...read more read less