Why would a fraud care about fraud? MAGA has been played for suckers. Donald has been on a pardon and commutation spree, and included in his latest round of commutations is the former co-owner of American Therapeutic Corp., Lawrence Duran, and he’s a real piece of work. Duran, whose company ran seven health care clinics in Florida, pleaded guilty in 2011 to multiple felonies, including defrauding Medicare, healthcare fraud, and money laundering, and was sentenced to 50 years in prison.
What did he do? He ripped off millions of dollars from Medicare.
The Miami Herald reports:
A judge sentenced Duran, now 63, to the longest prison term in history for Medicare fraud in September 2016. Trump issued Duran’s commutation on Wednesday. Duran and his girlfriend, Marianella Valera, the co-owner of the company and one of its therapists, filed 866,000 false claims with Medicare and received more than $87 million from their scheme, according to court records. Their case was part of a much larger probe that included 22 other defendants, including senior company employees, psychiatrists and patient recruiters. In all, the scheme involved $200 million in false billings. At the time, it was the nation’s largest Medicare therapy rip-off scam in history.
