A nurse practitioner from Nevada has been charged with multiple federal felonies after being accused of using clinics in the Houston area to steal hundreds of millions of dollars from Medicare.
Marizel Yukee, of Las Vegas, was indicted Thursday on federal Medicare fraud charges. Yukee is accused of working with others to defraud terminally ill people by providing them with unnecessary treatments and then billing the government for their care.
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Yukee allegedly bribed health care providers to make referrals to her business, and received kickbacks from distributors whose treatments she used, according to an indictment.
Over the course of nearly three years, Yukee billed Medicare and TRICARE, the health insurance program for members of the U.S. military, for more than $906 million. From those claims, the conspirators received about $297 million in payments, according to the Justice Department.
Yukee used the money to buy luxury items for herself, including a Ferrari supercar valued at more than $500,000, an $865,000 Bulgari necklace, a $1 million home in Hawaii and a $4.6 million beach resort in the Philippines, according to the indictment.
Yukee, a nurse practitioner, is the owner of multiple clinics including two located in Manvel and Pearland, according to the indictment. Three of the businesses advertise themselves as treating “wounds.”
Yukee’s businesses provided skin-substitute allografts, bioengineered from donated placental tissue, to treat wounds, according to the indictment.
Yukee allegedly paid health care providers to refer patients to her businesses. Yukee would then give the patients grafts that were “medically unreasonable and unnecessary,” according to the indictment.
Yukee’s clinics applied grafts to wounds that weren’t infected or that had already healed. The clinics applied grafts to “maximize profits” and gave treatments to wounds that wouldn’t heal because of a patient’s condition.
In some cases, hospice patients treated by Yukee died within days of receiving their grafts, according to the indictment.
Yukee allegedly falsified records to make it look as if the treatments were reasonable, according to prosecutors.
When it came time to seek reimbursement from Medicare for the treatments, Yukee directed a billing company to send invoices seeking more than double the amount she paid for the grafts.
Yukee billed the government for about $1 million per patient she treated, according to the indictment.
The government accuses Yukee of using the money to fund a lavish lifestyle. The indictment includes a photograph of the diamond necklace she allegedly purchased, as well as a rendering of the “Ultra Coastal Beach Resort” in Santa Ana, a resort town in the northern part of the Philippines.
The government is seeking to seize multiple properties from Yukee as part of its prosecution, including homes in Hawaii and Las Vegas and a commercial property in Pearland.
A warrant for Yukee’s arrest was issued on Thursday, according to court records. It’s not clear if she had been arrested as of Friday morning.
Yukee last year was sued in a Nevada federal court by one of the companies that provided her companies with skin grafts. The company, Alerce Biologix, accused Yukee and her daughter of bilking it out of $29 million. According to the lawsuit, Yukee last year asked the company for a refund of her purchase because Medicare had started to deny her reimbursements. The lawsuit was withdrawn in February after the company and Yukee reached an agreement on the claims. The terms of the agreement were not submitted to the court.
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This article originally published at Nevada nurse accused of $906M Medicare fraud scheme tied to Houston-area clinics, feds say.