Last month, the U.S. Department of Justice announced what it deemed the largest health care fraud takedown in history. Much of the attention was focused on Medicare scams.
The Justice Department accused doctors, hospice owners and other professionals of billing the government for unnecessary or fictitious services, racking up hundreds of millions of dollars.
But positioned alongside the fraud news was an announcement of a totally different kind of crackdown. The DOJ announced charges against dozens of people from the Houston area accused of running pill mills and “ghost pharmacies,” a type of sham business that buys pills in order to move them to the black market…