Question

“Whistle-Blower Suit Accuses Visiting Nurse Service of Fraud” New York Times 23 Sept. 2016

What is this article about?

Answer 1

The above mentioned article is about a fraud which was highlighted by a whistle-blower Edward Lacey who was a senior manager at the one of the largest non-profit home health care agencies in the United States Visiting Nurse Service.

The charges which are imposed on the Visiting Nurse Service of New York is that it has systematically extracted hundreds of millions of dollars from Medicare and Medicaid through falsified and improper billings and sometimes when patients needed care at a hospital they were sent home so that they can be billed by the NPO.

It is now considered as a massive fraud on the government and the charges are very serious from the view that the people who have suffered from such conduct of the agency are tens of thousands of elderly, disabled and impoverished citizens of New York City.

The agency has denied the allegations in a statement and said the allegations imposed are them are nothing but a disgruntled employees response when he has left working for them.

The suit was originally filed in 2014 in a United States District Court and the investigation was done confidentially. The three main areas of fraud are highlighted in the suit and all of it involves agency's core operation of providing nursing services at home.

The whistle-blower Mr. Lacey has also mentioned in the suit that he tried to correct whatever was happening at the agency Visiting Nursing Services but was not successful.

Falsification of time and service records by hundreds of agency nurses and therapists, agency’s wrong billing for home health aides who are provided through Partners in Care which is wholly owned by Visiting Nurse Service are serious charges against the agency and by prima-facie looking at it seems that the charges are correct and more investigation needs to be done to bring out the clear picture.