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This story about doctors and nursing homes committing Medicaid fraud and abusing helpless patients involves facilities in Illinois. I hope the same thing isn't happening in Texas. It's really sad and disgusting. Here is the beginning of an article in the Chicago Tribune:

Dr. Roland Borrasi chuckled as he told three doctors how he used kickbacks and cash bribes to shuttle unsuspecting nursing home residents into Chicago-area hospitals and psychiatric wards. "Basically, I have a commodity; my commodity is nursing home patients," Borrasi explained. He didn't know it at the time, but federal agents were secretly recording that meeting. One of the doctors was wearing a wire as Borrasi matter-of-factly explained the mechanics of patient brokering to physicians in his medical group.

Those recordings, along with court documents and federal investigative reports obtained by the Tribune, describe a web of corruption in which hundreds of thousands of dollars flowed among doctors, nursing home executives and hospital administrators as the facility operators sought to fill their beds with a steady flow of destitute patients.

While taxpayers paid millions of dollars in fraudulent Medicaid and Medicare bills, one Alzheimer's patient was given inappropriate brain radiation treatments, a Borrasi associate told federal agents. A second patient, a disoriented elderly woman, was sent to an acute psychiatric ward after she refused to eat in her nursing home dining hall, another medical professional told federal agents.

"The fact that ? greed subordinated the care of elderly and infirm patients who really needed it is horrific at best," federal prosecutors wrote in a court filing earlier this year after Borrasi was sentenced for accepting more than $500,000 in kickbacks to steer vulnerable patients. Prosecutors described "the scope and breadth of the bribes" as "extraordinary." Borrasi, now serving a six-year stint in a Kentucky federal prison, declined to comment.

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