A San Diego nurse practitioner kept billing Medicare for millions of dollars in mobile wound-care services even after she was locked up in federal prison on an unrelated sentence, according to federal prosecutors. Blanca Estela Cardenas and her daughter, Raquel Pasillas, were charged in a $9.5 million Medicare fraud scheme as part of the 2026 National Health Care Fraud Takedown, which targeted 455 defendants across the country in connection with over $6.5 billion in alleged fraud. The charges center on claims submitted through two entities, Mobile Care Medical Providers, LLC and B&R Wound Care, Inc., for wound-care services that prosecutors say could not have been performed as described because the supervising clinician was behind bars.
How a prison sentence failed to stop $9.5 million in Medicare claims
The fraud alleged here exposes a specific weakness in Medicare’s billing infrastructure. Under federal rules, certain wound-care services, such as debridement and dressing changes, can be billed to Medicare under a supervising clinician’s National Provider Identifier. This “incident to” framework requires the named provider to directly oversee the care and to be available to intervene if complications arise. When that provider is physically incarcerated, the supervision requirement becomes impossible to meet, yet the billing system has no automatic mechanism to flag the conflict.
Prosecutors allege that Cardenas remained the listed provider on claims submitted to Medicare even after she began serving an unrelated federal sentence. Her daughter, Pasillas, allegedly continued operating the billing side of the scheme and directed staff to keep using Cardenas’s credentials. The federal indictment identifies both Mobile Care Medical Providers, LLC and B&R Wound Care, Inc. as the entities through which the false claims flowed and describes a pattern of billing for high-level wound procedures that were not properly supervised.
The case, United States v. Blanca Cardenas, et al., was filed in the Southern District of California and focuses on services billed to Medicare beneficiaries in and around San Diego. According to prosecutors, claims continued to be submitted in Cardenas’s name despite her incarceration, allowing the entities to collect payments for visits she could not have attended. Investigators say that, in some instances, documentation was generated to make it appear as though she had evaluated patients or directed the care plan, even though she was in federal custody at the time…