Johnny Reed Jr. of Skid Row in Los Angeles said he was once offered money to go to a hospital.

Recruits often received no medical care at all, or in some cases received faulty health care, as in the case of one person, identified as Recruit X, who court papers said was “given a nitroglycerin patch for her non-existent cardiopulmonary condition.” The treatment caused a dangerous drop in blood pressure that made her ill, investigators said.

She was recruited repeatedly, court papers said, and for her cooperation was paid money that she used to buy crack cocaine.

This is what happens when there is no accountability - ie, public funds are in play. Eliminate the money and you eliminate the problem. Private entities must justify their expenses. What happened to the not for profit motto???

No one gets off welfare, no one learns how to feed themselves, no one can break the chains that the liberal system was created to keep them down.

Alleged Scheme Involved Homeless - NYTimes.com

An investigation into what the authorities say was a scheme that used homeless people to bilk tens of millions of dollars from federal and state health insurance programs began four years ago with a tip from a rescue mission employee.

The employee, Scott Johnson, who works for the Union Rescue Mission in the heart of Skid Row, said he had noticed vans and cars loading up homeless people.

“Sometimes they were so full of people that they put people in the trunks of cars,” Mr. Johnson said Thursday as he passed out bottles of water to the homeless. “I wondered what was going on, so I called the state authorities.”

Mr. Johnson said security cameras on the mission building captured what he initially thought were ambulances illegally discarding patients.

His tip in 2004, and those recordings, prompted state and local officials to investigate.

In October 2006, Los Angeles police officers videotaped an ambulance “dumping” five homeless patients. They later determined that the patients had been recruited as “human pawns in a scheme by hospitals, doctors, ambulance companies and others to defraud” health insurance programs, according to the city attorney’s complaint.

And on Wednesday, federal agents raided three private for-profit hospitals — Los Angeles Metropolitan Medical Center, City of Angels Medical Center, and Tustin Hospital and Medical Center in Orange County — in connection with an alleged fraud scheme involving federal Medicaid and state Medi-Cal health insurance programs. Agents arrested Dr. Rudra Sabaratnam, owner and chief executive of City of Angels Medical Center, and Estill Mitts, who is accused of recruiting patients from his Skid Row storefront church, the 7th Street Christian Day Center. Mr. Mitts posted $25,000 bond and is confined to his home. Dr. Sabaratnam posted $700,000 bail Thursday night.

In a 21-count grand jury indictment, the men are charged with conspiring to take and receive kickbacks for referrals and to commit health care fraud. Mr. Mitts is also charged with money laundering and tax evasion.

Skid Row residents said the ambulances arrived each morning heralded by hospital patient recruiters who offered food, cigarettes and sometimes cash, to the homeless people who call these grimy downtown sidewalks home. Patients were paid as much as $30, court papers say.

Residents said recruiters, also known as runners, would call out like street salesmen for anyone who had a multicolored Medi-Cal eligibility card: “Red, white and blue! Let it do what it do!”

A little later, the vans would leave Skid Row bound for one of the three hospitals. Some of the homeless people would receive medical treatments, court papers said, whether they needed them or not. Read more—->