Clinic Owner, Manager Guilty Of Insurance Fraud
POSTED: Wednesday, August 23, 2006
JACKSONVILLE, Fla. -- The former owner and the office manager of a walk-in medical clinic in Jacksonville were convicted Tuesday of 25 federal charges including health-care and mail fraud and lying to cover it up.
Robert Brown, 63, was the owner and acting manager of RCB Inc. Medical Clinic and Laurette Hunter, 42, was his office manager. The two were accused of working together from March 2002 until September 2004 to bill private insurance companies $2 million in services never provided, according to United States Attorney Paul Perez.
Prosecutors said many of the alleged patients were billed for services every day, for extended periods of time, and injections and tests that were never performed by doctors at RCB. Additionally, Brown was accused of ordering Hunter and another RCB employee to perform medical tests on themselves in order to create test result print-outs to support the false insurance claim forms.
Charges against Brown and Hunter included conspiring to commit health care fraud, conspiring to make false statements in connection with a health care matter, and conspiring to commit mail fraud.
Brown had been in trouble with the law before, having pleaded guilty in 1997 to giving teenage girls drugs in exchange for sex. He was released from prison in 2001, but remains a registered sexual offender.
Brown and Hunter are scheduled to be sentenced on the fraud charges Jan. 29, 2007.
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