Steve Neavling
ticklethewire.com
A surgeon at Chicago’s Sacred Heart Hospital is accused of performing unneeded tracheotomies to enable the for-profit hospital to collect as much as $160,000 per case, Bloomberg reports.
Investigators say the doctor sedated patients so much that they couldn’t breathe on their own so that he could perform a tracheotomy – or cut a hole in a patient’s throat to breathe.
The FBI got help from surreptitious tap recordings, Bloomberg reported.
“This complaint alleges the hospital and doctors were performing unnecessary invasive surgery to justify false billing,” said Ryan Stumphauzer, a former federal health care fraud prosecutor in Miami who reviewed the affidavit.
