Home Health Leader Gets 54 Months In Jail For Over $100M In Health Care Fraud

The owner of a Brooklyn-based home health agency is being sentenced to prison for four and a half years for her role in defrauding Medicaid funds, which resulted in the loss of more than $100 million.

According to Damian Williams, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Marianna Levin engaged in a widespread fraud scheme where she and co-conspirators collected Medicaid funding for home health and personal care services that were never rendered.

In his ruling, Williams called Levin’s actions “a massive, fraudulent home health scheme.”

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“As part of the scheme, Levin billed tens of millions of dollars to Medicaid for home health services that were not actually rendered,” Williams wrote in his ruling. “As a result, the scheme diverted much-needed resources meant to support services for vulnerable individuals. Today’s sentence sends a message that those who engage in health care fraud schemes will face stiff penalties.”

The scheme Levin orchestrated started sometime around 2015, according to the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ). Levin served in a senior executive role at her home health company and opened a second home health company with her co-conspirators, which was also based in Brooklyn.

The agencies employed about 3,000 home health and personal care aides and it appeared that the two companies offered services in all five of New York City’s boroughs and Nassau County.

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From 2015 to 2020, Medicaid reimbursed hundreds of millions of dollars for the services allegedly provided by the two agencies run by Levin, but a “significant portion of the agencies’ billings were fraudulent.”

“In particular, the agencies billed Medicaid for ‘no-show’ cases in which aides claimed to be performing home health or personal care services when they were not,” Williams ruling said. “At times when aides falsely claimed to be performing home health or personal care services, they, in fact, stayed home, ran personal errands, vacationed and socialized with family and friends.”

The money received from Medicaid would often be split between the aides and the patients who were supposedly involved in offering and receiving care. Over the course of the scheme, Levin received more than $5 million in compensation from the agencies.

The DOJ alleged that Levin and a second unnamed owner used the two facilities to try and skirt state overtime laws, and attempted to split cases for certain patients from both facilities so that individual aides worked less than 40 hours per week at each agency.

The aides and patients involved in the scheme paid kickbacks to Levin and other executive members of the two agencies to obtain and keep no-show cases, the DOJ said in its report.

The agencies also paid cash bonuses to those who referred new cases to them.

The timeframe matches up with New York state’s substantial increase in home health costs, particularly in Medicaid.

Spending in the home health space in New York tripled between the 2013 and 2019 fiscal years, representing a $4.8 billion increase, according to the state.

Nationwide, federal watchdogs have been narrowing in on home health-related fraud recently. In 2021, the federal government saw a return of nearly $1.9 billion in health care fraud settlements.

Of that, the Medicare Trust Funds received $1.2 billion and the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) received roughly $98.7 million.

Levin was also ordered to forfeit $1.5 million and pay restitution of over $36.3 million.

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