SCHENECTADY, N.Y. (WRGB) \u2014Two people have been charged in Schenectady with health care fraud for inflating Medicaid bills and stealing almost $2 million over five years.<\/p>\n
Mohammad Chaudhry faces seven charges, including grand larceny, related to Medicaid fraud involving his business, Angel Medical Transportation Inc. His business manager, Noah Shook, is accused of money laundering linked to the scheme.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur investigation found that Chaudhry, with the help of Shook, systematically defrauded the Medicaid program, enriching himself with millions meant to provide vital health care services to New Yorkers,\u201d said Thomas DiNapoli, New York State Comptroller.<\/p>\n
DiNapoli said the company would report rides that never occurred, bill group trips as multiple single-passenger rides, and pay people up to $500 to exclusively use their services.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe defendants harmed the very Medicaid recipients they were supposed to serve by taking advantage of at-risk patients seeking drug treatment and providing them with cash kickbacks, which, unfortunately, were often used by these patients to buy more drugs,\u201d said DiNapoli.<\/p>\n
This was not the first time Chaudhry was in court. In March, he reached a settlement with New York State Attorney General Letitia James over the same charges and several others. Despite that agreement, Schenectady County District Attorney Robert Carney said the fraud continued.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo we picked it up after they left off, and unfortunately, he was still in business, still doing the same stuff,\u201d said Carney. \u201cSo there are limits to what can be accomplished with civil enforcement.\u201dComment with Bubbles<\/p>\n
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Carney noted about 10% of Medicaid funds go toward transportation, and that\u2019s where a lot of health care fraud seems to stem. This is the second Medicaid fraud case his office has seen in the past four months alone, and he said the problem is becoming widespread. He expects similar cases may arise in the county in the near future.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"SCHENECTADY, N.Y. (WRGB) \u2014Two people have been charged in Schenectady with health care fraud for inflating Medicaid bills…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":250760,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[59],"tags":[97,252,253],"class_list":["post-250759","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-health-care","tag-health","tag-health-care","tag-healthcare"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/250759","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=250759"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/250759\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/250760"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=250759"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=250759"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=250759"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}