Home Health & Hospice Week

Bribes included NBA game tickets, designer bags, and cold hard cash.

Doctors, nurses, an executive, and more have been charged in a fraud case centered around the Bay Area’s largest home health agency.

Amity Home Health Care in San Francisco paid kickbacks to marketers, doctors, and other medical professionals in exchange for the certifi­cation or referral of patients for home health or hospice services, the Department of Justice says in a release.

Amity and some of its employees bribed individuals associated with hospitals, skilled nursing facilities, and doctors’ offices to induce those individuals to send patients to Amity and hospice Advent Care Inc. Amity often disguised the kickbacks as payroll, phony medical directorships, entertainment, reimbursements, gifts, or donations, federal complaints allege. The $8 million in bribes included Golden State Warriors tickets, Louis Vuitton bags, and “literal envelopes of cash,” reports the Mercury News.

Amity CEO Amanda Singh and her employees allegedly paid cash for each patient referral and for making introductions to physicians, case managers, or other health care professionals who could refer patients, according to the DOJ. The feds also have charged 13 physicians, five nurse/case managers, and one social worker. Nonclinical staff charged include a marketing director and five marketers.

The government charged 28 people, as well as the HHA and hospice. Doctors and other defendants with “ruffled clothes, muffled hair, and untucked shirts appeared stunned” as a federal judge read the charges against them in court, the News says.

“This is the largest cash-for-patients scheme ever charged criminally in the Northern District of California,” U.S. Attorney David L. Anderson says in the DOJ release.