“Planned Parenthood is the most cost-effective provider of family planning services in this country.”
Cecile Richards may rue the day she said these words in an interview last month with an Oregon newspaper.
Jill Stanek is reporting that a former employee of Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast has filed a whistleblower’s complaint [PDF] with the Attorney General of Texas and the U.S. Department of Justice alleging that PPGC’s management engaged in an elaborate Medicaid fraud scheme:
Karen Reynolds, who worked as a “health care assistant” from 1999 to 2009 at the Lufkin, Texas, branch of the affiliate formerly known as Planned Parenthood of Houston and Southeast Texas, has submitted company memos and emails to support her charge that PPGC has engaged in a systemwide scheme to bilk Medicaid, Title XX, and the Women’s Health Program of tens of millions of dollars over the course of at least a decade.
The complaint alleges that PPGC’s policy of which medical services to provide and charge for depended largely on who was paying. If the patient was self-paying, then only “services based on medical necessity” were provided. But if the government was footing the bill through a program like Medicaid, then Planned Parenthood would run up quite a tab, “often provid[ing] services on an ‘across the board’ basis even when such services were not medically necessary.”
Jill also notes that another method of bilking taxpayers was to give a bag of condoms and vaginal film to all Medicaid patients who were contracepting, even if they were not requested!
But the most striking allegation in the complaint describes how PPGC falsfied charts of aborting or post-abortive patients to make it look as if their visit was for some other reason.
Jill has much more information in her post—read the whole thing.
To be sure, this isn’t the first time a whistleblower has accused “the most cost-effective provider of family planning services in this country” of fraud.
And I’m going out on a limb and guessing it won’t be the last.
