How expensive are "pill mills" to insurance companies? Consider just these three ex-operators:
Dr. Jorge Martinez, an Ohio pain management specialist, attempted to bilk insurance companies out of $60 million -- receiving about $12 million -- for narcotic drugs and expensive diagnostic tests he never performed. He fraudulently billed insurers for more than 100 patients a day for years. He's now serving life in prison.
California medical clinic operator Tam Vu Pham paid more than 5,000 healthy people to consent to have surgeries performed on them so he could bill insurers more than $96 million.
The $6 million in narcotics that flowed freely from the Wichita, Kan., pill mill run by Dr. Stephen Schneider led to 68 overdose deaths linked to insurer-paid prescriptions handed out by the doctor and his wife. The prescription for Dr. Schneider: 30 years in prison.
"Crooked pain clinics will hand out addictive painkillers like gumdrops to almost anyone who asks, and insurance companies are paying for all those addicts," says Quiggle. "Feeding narcotics to addicts on the street could cost insurers billions of dollars in money that they don't even know they're losing."