Insurance Fraud

From the Wall Street Journal's Health Blog:

Hospital execs pay kickbacks to middlemen who recruit homeless people for hospital stays that aren’t medically necessary. The hospital bills government insurance programs for the patients’ treatment. In a detail ready-made for film-noir treatment, the hospital is called “City of Angels.”

Dante Nicholson, a former senior vice president at City of Angels Medical Center, pleaded guilty yesterday to paying kickbacks to recruit patients from LA’s skid row as part of a scheme to defraud Medicare and Medi-Cal, California’s insurance program for the poor, the Los Angeles Times reports.