Intimate Wars by Merle Hoffman

Author:Merle Hoffman
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: The Feminist Press at CUNY
Published: 2011-10-27T16:00:00+00:00

AMID THE TURMOIL of my days at Choices, my life was changed irrevocably by another kind of opposing force. I received a piece of paper that would hang over the next seven years of my life like the sword of Damocles. It was a subpoena from the Deputy Attorney General for Medicaid Fraud Control announcing that I was being investigated.

HIP’s law firm Stroock, Stroock, and Lavan advised me to hire Thomas Puccio, the attorney who defended Claus Von Bulow when he was accused of attempting to murder his wife. This was comparable to using an elephant to swat a fly, and only made the civil servants of the Health Department more incensed.

It took three years before I even learned exactly why they were investigating me, what they considered fraudulent in my practice. Feeling like Joseph K. in Franz Kafka’s The Trial, I almost went crazy going over and over every act of my professional career at Choices, trying to figure out what exactly could be construed as a felony.

Those years were a special kind of hell. It felt as though I had a terminal disease that would go into remission and rear up again unexpectedly. I never knew when another subpoena would come, when the prosecutors would want another piece of information. At one point there were two grand juries sitting on me and interviewing my employees about the most minute details of my professional life. The boundaries I’d so carefully fostered no longer existed; I was a potential felon, and my employees now held a silent and palpable power over me that I could not even articulate. I had to maintain the image of normalcy—give directives, meet with them, act as if none of it was happening. I could not even allow an unguarded glance to betray me, because if I gave the impression of communicating with them about their testimony, I would be accused of obstructing justice, yet another felony.

Eventually the prosecutor had a meeting with my attorneys and I finally learned the reason for the investigation. Because we were a licensed facility, I saw patients who could not have anesthesia during their procedures because Medicaid didn’t cover it. I felt it was unfair that women with private insurance or cash could have greater care and comfort during their procedure than women who were poor, so I decided to offer anesthesia to Medicaid patients for fifty dollars (or whatever they could afford)—much less than it actually cost, but it defrayed the loss a bit. I had patients sign a form outlining the fact that this was not part of their Medicaid coverage and if they chose they could pay what they could afford out of pocket. I finally learned that the Medicaid regulations did not allow providers to charge any out-of-pocket expenses at all to Medicaid recipients; this was considered Medicaid fraud, a felony.

Marty offered to “take the rap” for me, but they wanted me. I told very few people, so he and I were left to ourselves to handle our anxiety.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.