A Columbia doctor was indicted in federal court on accusations that he was defrauding Medicare and Medicaid.<\/p>\n
On April 8, 2026, Dr. Jonathan Wayne Morris, 46, was indicted with 15 counts of illegal prescribing of controlled substances and 23 counts of health care fraud.<\/p>\n
Dr. Morris owned Columbia Urgent Care, starting in 2019.<\/p>\n
A press release from the Eastern District of Missouri states that federal prosecutors said Morris incorrectly bills Medicare and Medicaid.<\/p>\n
They said that he billed for services provided by assistant physicians (APs), who are medical school graduates who have not entered a residency program.<\/p>\n
APs must be trained and supervised by a fully licensed physician.<\/p>\n
The indictment stated that Morris did not train the APs, instead letting them train each other, and that he left them unsupervised.<\/p>\n
Morris was also accused of prescribing drugs with no legitimate medical purpose.<\/p>\n
The release stated that he prescribed drugs to friends, associates, and people with whom he had sexual relationships.<\/p>\n
He was also accused of prescribing drugs to people with substance abuse disorders.<\/p>\n
Morris was accused of accepting cash in some cases. In other cases, Morris was accused of prescribing the drugs to people whom he then made sexual advances on.<\/p>\n
He allegedly submitted false claims to Medicaid and Medicare for fake controlled substance prescriptions.<\/p>\n
The press release states that Morris issued about 15,000 doses of controlled substances to about 20 people.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A Columbia doctor was indicted in federal court on accusations that he was defrauding Medicare and Medicaid. On…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":602996,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[59],"tags":[97,252,253],"class_list":["post-602995","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\/602995","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=602995"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/602995\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/602996"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=602995"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=602995"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=602995"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}