The head of a large hospice care company has been charged with defrauding Medicare and Medicare by falsifying the level of hospice care provided for patients in nursing homes he controlled, say prosecutors. In the lawsuit against Seth Gillman, administrator and part owner of Passages Hospice LLC, the government charges that he trained nurses to look for signs that allegedly would qualify a hospice patient for general inpatient care, resulting in payments four times higher than routine care.
In many instances the suit says, patients were not terminally ill and stayed in hospice care longer than the required life expectancy of six months or less.
It is also alleged that network directors were paid bonuses based on the amount of general inpatient care they oversaw.
