JACKSONVILLE, Fla \u2014 Jonathan Simeon Gholston, 35, of Jacksonville, admitted to conspiring to receive illegal kickbacks for referring Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries to a local pharmacy for HIV post-exposure prophylactic medications. He faces up to five years in federal prison. <\/p>\n
According to court documents, Gholston owned a marketing company that partnered with a Jacksonville pharmacy. Marketers set up tents in low-income areas offering free, government-sponsored cellphones in exchange for personal information. While signing people up for phones, they also collected health insurance details \u2014 including Medicare and Medicaid coverage \u2014 without individuals requesting or consenting to receive HIV medications.<\/p>\n
The pharmacy allegedly used that information to generate prescriptions authorized by a nurse practitioner who had not examined or spoken to the patients. The pharmacy then billed Medicare and Medicaid about $4,000 per month per person for the medications.<\/p>\n
Investigators say the scheme led to more than 20,000 fraudulent claims and approximately $24.2 million in reimbursements \u2014 about $11.6 million from Medicare and $12.5 million from Medicaid. Gholston personally received about $2.27 million, which he has agreed to forfeit.<\/p>\n
Authorities say some recipients were put at serious health risk because they were prescribed medications without proper medical evaluation.<\/p>\n
\u25b6 Listen to Jacksonville\u2019s Morning News Interviews<\/a><\/p>\n Click here<\/a> to download our free news, weather and traffic app. And click here<\/a> to subscribe to our daily 3 Big Things newsletter.<\/p>\n \u00a92026 Cox Media Group<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"JACKSONVILLE, Fla \u2014 Jonathan Simeon Gholston, 35, of Jacksonville, admitted to conspiring to receive illegal kickbacks for referring…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":174335,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[796,794,28,116,118,117,795,349],"class_list":{"0":"post-177636","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-jacksonville","8":"tag-796","9":"tag-duval","10":"tag-florida","11":"tag-jacksonville","12":"tag-jacksonville-headlines","13":"tag-jacksonville-news","14":"tag-ne-florida","15":"tag-northeast-florida"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177636","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=177636"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177636\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/174335"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=177636"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=177636"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=177636"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}