An Anaheim woman pleaded guilty Thursday to a federal health care fraud charge for submitting more than $2.2 million in fraudulent Medicare claims for hospice care provided to patients who were not terminally ill.<\/p>\n
Lynn Galbraith, 60, pleaded guilty to one count of health care fraud and faces up to 10 years in federal prison, according to the U.S. Attorney\u2019s Office.<\/p>\n
U.S. District Judge John A. Kronstadt scheduled sentencing for Dec. 3.<\/p>\n
Galbraith co-owned and operated Garden Grove-based Azure Hospice Care Inc. from September 2019 until July 2022, when she became the company\u2019s sole owner, prosecutors said. She remained the sole owner until February 2024.<\/p>\n
According to her plea agreement, Galbraith knowingly submitted or caused the submission of Medicare claims for hospice services involving beneficiaries who did not have a terminal illness with a life expectancy of six months or less.<\/p>\n
Prosecutors said Galbraith either knew the patients did not qualify for hospice care or knew their medical records did not contain sufficient documentation supporting a diagnosis and prognosis that qualified them for Medicare hospice benefits.<\/p>\n
She also did not routinely coordinate with the patients\u2019 primary care physicians regarding their purported conditions or terminal prognoses, according to the U.S. Attorney\u2019s Office.<\/p>\n
In one instance in October 2022, Galbraith submitted a $6,600 Medicare claim for hospice services provided to a beneficiary despite knowing there was insufficient medical documentation to establish the patient\u2019s eligibility for hospice care, prosecutors said.<\/p>\n
Galbraith admitted submitting approximately $2.27 million in fraudulent claims to Medicare on behalf of Azure Hospice Care, with Medicare paying the company approximately $2.14 million.<\/p>\n
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General investigated the case.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"An Anaheim woman pleaded guilty Thursday to a federal health care fraud charge for submitting more than $2.2…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":445469,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[176494,163,165,164,3130,4164,76458,15768,8189,4165,1557],"class_list":["post-445468","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-anaheim","tag-2-2","tag-anaheim","tag-anaheim-headlines","tag-anaheim-news","tag-fraud","tag-guilty","tag-hospice","tag-medicare","tag-million","tag-pleads","tag-woman"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/445468","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=445468"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/445468\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/445469"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=445468"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=445468"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=445468"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}