Many nursing homes are being caught and punished for allowing illegal “kickbacks” to become a part of their system and a way to gain more money. An example of one of these illegal kickbacks is when the facility will pay doctors to send patients unnecessarily to their facility. Doing this increases the amount of patients that will come to their facility, which increases the amount of people they are billing, bringing in more money for the facility.
Facilities can keep these “kickbacks” going for quite awhile. If the government does not catch on to these schemes then it will usually be exposed by a “whistleblower.” The whistleblowers are the people who come to the government and expose the scandal. They are almost always rewarded for doing this with money. These people get rewarded because many times exposing the scandals puts their jobs on the line. Another reason they are rewarded is so other people will see that there is a reward for doing the right thing and want to replicate that action. The nursing home punished had a “whistleblower” that was the company’s chief financial officer. He is said to be getting over four million dollars in rewards for his acts. For more, read the story.
