An Orange County-based ambulance company quietly paid the U.S. government more than $3 million to settle a lawsuit alleging it received over-payments from Medicare and other federal programs through ambulance rides to patients who did not need them. A federal judge in Santa Ana recently unsealed the lawsuit the U.S. Attorney's office brought against FILYN Corp., which is based in Anaheim under the business name Lynch Ambulance.
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André Birotte Jr., who heads the U.S. Attorney's office in Los Angeles, recently revealed that the allegations from 2001 through 2007 had Lynch regularly billing Medicare, TRICARE and the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program for transporting patients who were not “bed-confined” or whose transports otherwise were not medically necessary.
The feds essentially took over a whistleblower suit against the company that had been filed by former Lynch employees Jamie Weatherly and Dawn Lucero. The ambulance company and its principals settled without admitting any wrongdoing.
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OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.