Ensuring patient safety is at the heart of the Hippocratic Oath which includes “First, Do No Harm.” As the nation’s largest payer for health care service, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services mission in their National Quality Strategy includes ensuring everyone is safe when they receive care. Something that fraudsters never say. Because they don’t care who they harm.
For all intents and purposes, it appeared that Johann Farley was also ensuring patient safety, as the Department of Medicare and Medicaid do. Farley was a physician who ran an addiction treatment practice in Merrillville, Indiana. Many of his patients struggled with opioid addiction and relied on him to help treat their addiction. Farley required these patients to come to his office frequently, sometimes on a daily basis. That was on paper at least. But inconsistent with the reality of his practice requirements, these patient visits with Farley only lasted a few minutes, or not at all. For over four years, Farley fraudulently submitted claims to Medicaid and Medicare falsely representing that he had complex, extended visits with his patients for several hours each week.
In total, between January 2016 and May 2020, Farley billed Medicaid and Medicare for more than 7,000 services he did not actually provide and was paid more than a half a million dollars for work he never performed. The taxpayer isn’t the only ones harmed here. Hundreds of patients seeking help, were left unaided in their recovery. The very opposite to the oath that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid follow.
On October 7, 2024, Farley was sentenced to 12 months and one day in prison followed by one year of supervised release. He was also ordered to pay restitution totaling $557,000.
Excellent job by the Medicaid Fraud Control Unit of the Indiana Attorney General’s Office and the United States Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General in this case.
Today’s Fraud of The Day is based on article “Merrillville addiction doctor gets 1 year for fraud” published by Chicago Tribune on October 7, 2024.
A German-born Merrillville addiction doctor was sentenced to one year and one day Thursday in a plea deal for bilking $557,000 from Medicare and Medicaid, records show.
Johann Farley, 60, of Crown Point, pleaded guilty in the U.S. District Court in Hammond in June to healthcare fraud. He will have to repay $444,000 to Medicaid and $113,000 to Medicare. Authorities said it was the “bulk of his income FROM January 2016 to May 2020, documents show.
