One billion dollars is a sum that gets your attention, especially when it’s alleged Medicare fraud.
A Las Vegas nurse practitioner…
Not an administrator, not a doctor, a nurse practitioner. Although the average nurse practitioner earns about $130,000 a year in Texas, that’s still not the sort of profile you usually see in billion dollar fraud cases.
..who operated wound care clinics in Pearland and Manvel has been indicted on federal charges alleging she masterminded one of the largest Medicare fraud schemes ever prosecuted in the Houston area, billing the government for nearly $1 billion in treatments prosecutors say were medically unnecessary, falsified, or administered to patients who were already dying.
Pearland and Manvel are to the south of Houston, exurbs that are turning into suburbs. 60 years ago, Manvel had a hundred people, and now it has an estimated 17,261 population, doubling what it had in 2020.
Marizel Yukee was indicted June 18 in the Southern District of Texas on charges including conspiracy to commit health care fraud, wire fraud, conspiracy to pay and receive illegal kickbacks, and money laundering, according to the federal indictment. A warrant for her arrest was issued the same day.
Prosecutors allege that between October 2023 and April 2026, Yukee and unnamed co-conspirators submitted more than $906 million in fraudulent claims to Medicare and TRICARE, the federal health insurance program covering military members and their families, through four wound care companies she owned: Wound Medic, My BestHealth First, AllCare Mobile Wound Treatment, and Oracle Wound Treatment. From those claims, the government paid out approximately $297 million, according to the indictment.
The scheme centered on skin-substitute allografts, which are bioengineered from donated placental tissue and used to treat chronic wounds. According to prosecutors, Yukee’s clinics applied those grafts to wounds that were already healed, infected and ineligible for treatment, or to patients who had no qualifying wounds at all. In some cases, hospice patients received grafts and died within days, according to the indictment.
Prosecutors allege Yukee paid health care providers to refer patients to her clinics, and separately received nearly $16 million in kickbacks from allograft distributors whose products she used. In one documented example from the indictment, she paid $1,600 for a graft product and then directed her billing company to invoice Medicare for $3,900, more than double the actual cost. She averaged more than $1 million in billed claims per patient, according to prosecutors.
The indictment accuses Yukee of falsifying patient records to make the treatments appear medically appropriate and of instructing colleagues via email to inflate prices when seeking reimbursement.
Prosecutors allege the proceeds funded an extravagant personal lifestyle.
Of course she did.
The indictment identifies a Ferrari valued at more than $500,000, an $865,000 Bulgari diamond necklace, a $1 million home in Hawaii, and a $4.6 million beach resort under construction in the Philippines. Investigators have also seized a Porsche, a Mercedes, an Escalade, two Teslas, and roughly $467,000 in cash.
She should have tried building her stolen money resort in a country without an extradition treaty with the U.S. Then again, it probably won’t shock you to learn that Yukee is herself a Philippines national.
The government is seeking forfeiture of several properties, including real estate in Hawaii and Las Vegas and a commercial property in Pearland.
I have to think that the sheer scale of her operation probably doomed her. Employees in her Houston-area clinics had to have known skin drafts for dying patients weren’t medically necessary. All it takes is one or two of them squealing for the feds to lower the boom.
I notice she started her (alleged) shenanigans under the Biden Administration. How many more untold billions in fraud did that headless machine enable?
Tags: AllCare Mobile Wound Treatment, Brazoria County, Crime, fraud, Houston, Las Vegas, Marizel Yukee, Medicare, My BestHealth First, Nevada, Oracle Wound Treatment, Philippines, Texas, Welfare State, Wound Medic
Most of us in healthcare are trying very hard to do everything right.
I wish a death penalty on people who betray the trust of patients and taxpayers. In healthcare, government and NGO’s.
In Alaska, by Michener, anyone who stole along the Klondike from a miner was killed in frontier justice. Stealing someone’s food meant they could die.
Bring back the frontier!
My wife and I have both been victims of Medicare fraud. We’d get billed for medical equipment that we didn’t order or need from doctors we had never heard of in some other state. Hundreds or thousands of dollars a month. Every time we would get a Medicare statement I’d dutifully report it on the IG hotline. Eventually Medicare sent us new cards with new numbers. My secondary insurer was smart enough to refuse the charges from the get go.
Not to minimize this crook’s massive crookiness, but re that ill gotten stuff list, Hawaii real estate only slightly lags behind SF Bay Area prices, so a million dollar home in Hawaii is very likely less impressive that one might think – more along the lines of a 1,000sf tract house than the Robin Masters Estate.
Next the Dems will argue that the fraud is good for the economy because it’s being spent buying stuff.
i’ve worked in the healthcare biz for over 32 years – all on the business end. i’ve caught a few fraudsters and a former colleague got a $1M+ whistleblower reward. i get quite a few industry newsletters and see similar stories often. this is relatively common in the wound care space where there are low barriers to entry and minimal supervision. same is true in home care, non-emergent medical transportation, and durable medical equipment. the smarter fraudsters keep a lower profile until they want to cash out.
“Immigrants do the jobs Americans won’t do.”
Marizel Yukee is a Filipina nurse practitioner from Tuguegarao City.
https://www.gmanetwork.com/news/pinoyabroad/dispatch/992165/filipina-accused-of-leading-p52-b-healthcare-fraud-network-in-us/story/
[…] it’s Medicare fraudsters with connection to the Philippines week here at […]