Work Comp Central’s Greg Jones has relentlessly followed and reported on the Michael Drobot case in Southern California, a case that fairly oozes greed and sleaze.
For the uninitiated, Michael Drobot’s Pacific Health Corporation owned two hospitals, Pacific Hospital of Long Beach and Tri-City Regional Medical Center in Hawaiian Gardens. For around 10 years, he paid kickbacks to a number of doctors for referring spinal fusion patients to Pacific Hospital of Long Beach for surgery. In February, 2014, Drobot pleaded guilty to making the kickbacks, which are illegal, and for charging California’s workers’ compensation system, the U.S. Department of Labor and about 150 workers’ compensation insurers somewhere in the vicinity of $500 million dollars for the surgeries over the ten year period. At that time, we wrote about this with Honor Sold, Trust Betrayed: Unbridled Greed in California.
Drobot is also charged with bribing state senator Ron Calderon for his help in easing one of the SB 863 requirements, which we don’t need to go into here. Calderon has pleaded not guilty, and that case is moving through the system.
Throughout this sordid business, Greg Jones has been there, providing a valuable service with his spot-on reporting, most recently last week with his story (subscription required) that a number of the doctors who took the kickbacks, at $15,000 a pop, also had filed “more than 15,000 liens with a total claimed value of $93.8 million.” To get that story, Jones had to wade through what must have been a steamer trunk full of documents.
Personally, I owe a debt of gratitude to Mr. Jones. He found two errors in my post of 30 November, Workers’ Comp Fraud: The Michael Drobot Case Grinds On. I had written that the kickback scheme involved both of the Drobot hospitals. That was wrong. They only happened at Pacific Hospital at Long Beach. Also, I had written that Drobot had pleaded guilty to bribing Calderon. He did not. He is charged with doing it, and both he and Calderon have pleaded not guilty. Before Work Comp Central ran my post, Greg found the errors and made edits to correct them, for which I am grateful.
The Drobot case is complicated and it represents the bottom of the workers’ compensation bird cage. However, the solid reporting of Greg Jones shines an arc light on the sorry mess and will help to improve the system so that in the future the Drobots of the world will think twice about this kind of criminality.
Tags: California, fraud, healthcare
