Stealing … which is worse?

By Freddy Groves
I don’t know which is worse: stealing millions of dollars from the VA or stealing pain drugs from patients.
In one case, a pair of holistic health care center co-owners submitted claims for reimbursement for $1.9 million in treatments before they were nabbed for health care fraud, conspiracy and filing false claims. Advertised as a chiropractor with several branch offices, the thieves billed for services that never occurred, such as hot and cold therapy, acupuncture (that was actually massages) done by others, treatments that weren’t medically necessary and more.
Then there’s the elderly veteran who had two small businesses. On the one hand, he claimed individual unemployability benefits from the VA (which is given when a veteran gets money equal to a 100% disability rating because he can’t work). On the other hand, the guy applied for a service-disabled veteran-owned rating for his two businesses, stating that he was the owner, worked lots of hours … and received millions of dollars in VA small business contracts. Then he applied for Social Security disability and raked in money from that, claiming he couldn’t work. He’ll be paying back a lot of money.
As bad as that was, this is much worse: A VA nurse pleaded guilty to taking drugs that were intended for ill and dying patients in intensive care. Most of the time she would give only a partial dose to the patient and take the rest herself. In one case, she did this 19 times over nine days to a patient. Can you imagine?
She also volunteered to take care of a particular patient so she could steal the patient’s drugs. The three drugs in question were fentanyl (50 to 100 times more potent than morphine and heroin), hydromorphone (two to eight times stronger than morphine) and oxycodone, all pain medications. Maximum prison time for these crimes could be only four years. That’s shameful. For denying sick and dying patients their pain medication, she deserves much more punishment than that.
(c) 2024 King Features Synd., Inc.