Attorney generals in three states, including New Jersey, have filed a civil complaint against a group of medical centers for allegedly subjecting Medicare and Medicaid recipients with end-stage renal disease to unnecessary surgeries and defrauding both of the federal health insurance programs, officials said.
However, most of these patients had no problems receiving dialysis and did not need these surgeries, investigators said. Fresenius Vascular Care parent company’s own research allegedly showed that the so-called “monitoring” surgeries they performed do not benefit patients and, in fact, can damage their ability to receive life-saving dialysis treatment.
Fresenius Vascular Care subjected the patients, which included elderly people, people of color, and low-income individuals, to unnecessary and invasive procedures to increase its revenues and decrease expenses, according to the complaint. One dialysis patient in New Jersey endured on at least nine unnecessary X-rays and angioplasties between March 2013 and June 2018, the complaint continued. In several instances, the patient was asked to come in for timed “clinical evaluations” without a referral and would then be operated on, with the defendants billing Medicare and New Jersey Medicaid for thousands of dollars with each procedure.
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