The details of a massive Medicaid fraud lawsuit filed against Planned Parenthood by a former employee alleges the company scammed taxpayers out of $28 million in false claims made over a 10 year period.
World Net Daily is reporting that the newly released details of the suit, which was filed in March 2011, was brought by Sue Thayer, former manager of Iowa’s Storm Lake and LeMars Planned Parenthood clinics. Thayer claims that between 2002 and 2009, Planned Parenthood knowingly committed Medicaid fraud by seeking improper and even illegal reimbursement from Iowa Medicaid Enterprise and the Iowa Family Planning Network. The suit claims the organization submitted “repeated false, fraudulent, and/or ineligible claims for reimbursement.
Thayer worked at Planned Parenthood in Storm Lake for nearly 17 years before her job was eliminated in budget cuts. She believes her stance against so-called telemed abortions, in which doctors remotely dispense abortion drugs to clients via online video connection, led to her dismissal.
The allegations “came to light over time as I worked there,” she told The Des Moines Register. “I kept seeing things and asking, ‘Is this the right way to do things?’ I found out it was not.”
According to Thayer’s attorneys at Alliance Defending Freedom (formerly known as the Alliance Defense Fund), if she prevails in the suit, Planned Parenthood could be ordered to pay the United States and Iowa as much as $5.5 billion in False Claims Act damages and penalties.
“Americans really deserve to know if their hard-earned tax dollars are being funneled to groups that are misusing [them],” said Senior Counsel Michael J. Norton, a former U. S. attorney working with Alliance Defending Freedom who is representing Thayer. “People may disagree on their views about abortion, but everyone can agree that Planned Parenthood must play by the same rules as everyone else. It is not entitled to any public funds, especially if it is defrauding Medicaid and the American taxpayer.”
Among the many charges made in the suit, Thayer claims Planned Parenthood ran a “C-Mail” scheme in which they automatically sent a year’s supply of birth control pills to women who came into the clinic – often without a physician’s orders or without the patient’s consent. They then billed Medicaid $26.32 per month for the pills even though they only cost the cost $2.98. The scheme was so profitable, Thayer claims Planned Parenthood held competitions among its clinics to see who could sign up the most women in the “C-Mail” program.
Even more outrageous, on those occasions when the post office returned packages pills to Planned Parenthood, instead of crediting Medicaid, the clinics resold the same pills and billed Medicaid for them a second time!
Clinics also found a way around the abortion prohibition. Even though there were not permitted to bill Medicaid for abortions, they submitted bills for everything but the actual procedure including office visits, ultrasounds, lab work, counseling and abortion aftercare “all of which were, when provided, integral to and/or related to surgical and medical abortion procedures,” Thayer’s suit alleges.
“As a result, abortions provided by Planned Parenthood were subsidized by public funds,” the suit contends.
In a statement issued by Planned Parenthood of the Heartland President Jill June, she called the suit part of a “pattern of harassment” and accused Thayer of partnering with an “extreme organization” to try to bring down the abortion giant. She went on to boast that neither embattled U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder nor Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller has opted to prosecute the case.
“It wasn’t until employment was ended that Thayer partnered with this extreme group against Planned Parenthood, that she began releasing mistruths about our organization,” June said.
Thayer has not been cowed by Planned Parenthood’s rhetoric and says she views her suit as “an important piece in the nationwide effort to shed light on the darkness and deception surrounding America’s largest abortion provider, Planned Parenthood. It seems that God can use all those years that I spent working at Planned Parenthood for His good.”
The lawsuit Thayer v. Planned Parenthood of the Heartland is currently pending in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Iowa.
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