You couldn’t have pulled this out of a Robin Cook novel quickly enough. Medicare/Medicaid fraud, while justifiable as criminal behavior — is often thought of as “white collar”, a vocation whose participation usually involves the skills of corporate hierarchy at the hands of relatively sociopathic upwardly mobile, otherwise respectable pillars of a functional society.

Well, this type of malfeasance just got a little grittier.

…federal investigators have been threatened, an informant’s body was found riddled with bullets, and a woman was discovered dead in a pharmacy under investigation, her throat slit with a piece of broken toilet seat.

No, this isn’t a description of a drug bust gone bad for which a couple of kilos of cocaine was at stake. Rather, it is a vignette increasingly associated with the mafia and its recruitment of equally shadowy characters eager to bilk the government’s largest healthcare payer. Tony Soprano would be proud. | LINK

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