FBI Raids Calif. Ambulance Company

Oct. 22--Federal agents on Tuesday raided the offices of ProCare Mobile Response, a Los Angeles-based ambulance company that was named earlier this year as an alleged co-conspirator in a whistleblower lawsuit claiming that an illegal kickback scheme bilked millions of dollars from Medicare and Medi-Cal.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Office of the Inspector General at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services confirmed that their agents participated in the raid on ProCare's headquarters in execution of a federal search warrant.

Neither would comment on the details of their investigation, and a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney General's Office in L.A. said the search warrant was under seal.

A spokesman for the Office of the Inspector General said a "large majority" of cases investigated by his agency involve "waste, fraud and abuse" in Medicare and Medicaid, the two largest government health insurance programs. Medi-Cal is the name of Medicaid in California.

A lawyer representing ProCare, Patric Hooper, said he did not know whether the investigation was connected to the Medicare and Medi-Cal fraud allegations contained in the whistleblower suit.

"We're still trying to gather facts on what that's all about," Hooper said. "We don't have any other information other than the fact they were investigated."

The lawsuit, filed by former psychiatric nurse Julie Macias, claimed that ProCare got kickbacks for its part in a scheme to take elderly and disabled people on illegal psychiatric holds and transport them to the now-shuttered Los Angeles Metropolitan Medical Center. The hospital was accused of locking them in the psych ward and billing Medicare and MediCal, the two largest government health insurance progams, for their unwarranted care.

Los Angeles Metropolitan is owned by Tustin-based Pacific Health Corp., which was criminally charged two years ago for recruiting homeless people from Skid Row in Los Angeles and admitting them to its hospitals -- including L.A. Metropolitan -- with bogus diagnoses and billing the government for their unnecessary treatments. Pacific Health agreed to pay $16.5 million to settle the charges.

Pacific Health has since closed or sold all four of its hospitals.

Contact the writer: 714-796-2440 or bwolfson@ocregister.com

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