Subject: Medicaid

• Foster Kids In Texas Get Lots of Meds

  August 4, 2008

• Gloom And Doom For Uninsured Texas Children

  November 3, 2008

• Local Attorneys Help Hit Drugmaker Hard

  $800 million is a ton of money to settle a civil suit, but two Houston attorneys helped win a settlement of that size this morning.Joel Androphy, who specializes in whistleblower suits, worked with Sarah Frazier and won a big one as the drug giant Eli Lilly agreed to pay that whopping amount to settle a civil suit over its development of the anti-psychotic drug Zyprexa. Lilly will pay another $615 million to settle a related criminal case.Zyprexa is a drug approved for use against bipolar disord

  January 15, 2009

• Days in the Park

  January 30, 1997

• Guilty Of Medicaid Fraud? Depends

  If you're going to try to defraud the government, please -- for your own self-esteem -- choose a more glamorous plan than one involving adult diapers.When the announcement came in from the US Attorney's Office headlined that a local company owner had been "INDICTED IN ADULT DIAPER FRAUD CASE," we couldn't wait to open the e-mail.Had some nefarious con man sold adult diapers that turned out to actually not be absorbent? (We can see Tom Hanks in the SNL's "Sabra Price is Right" skit: "Yes, yes, it

  February 13, 2009

• Cozy Ties

  July 10, 1997

• Holistic Touch

  July 17, 1997

• Bad Deal

  December 4, 1997

• All in a Day's Work

  April 2, 1998

• The President's Analyst

  April 30, 1998

• Methodist Hospital Gets Hit For Medicaid Fraud

  Seal courtesy DOJUsually when the Justice Department announces the settlement of a Medicaid-fraud case, it's a small-time operation dealing with wheelchairs or even adult diapers.Not today.Today they've nabbed a nearly-$10 million settlement out of Methodist Hospital here for defrauding the federal program.The US Attorney's office announcement said: The government alleged that, between January 2001 and August 2003, Methodist improperly inflated charges for inpatient and outpatient care to make i

  March 26, 2009

• Hispanics Delivered by Border Midwives Are Having Trouble Getting U.S. Passports: Location, Location

  Midwives further north say business is much better than for their counterparts to the south

  December 18, 2008

• What Happens When Chronically Ill Kids Grow Up

  Physically disabled young adults who weren't supposed to live this long find themselves hemmed in by an unprepared heath care system

  June 26, 2008

• Falun Follow-up

  Plus: Porn Priorities?, House Woes, Sit on It

  July 25, 2002

• Bar X Views

  Plus: Junk Food, Junk Suits; Pigeon Hold, Meds for the Poor

  February 6, 2003

• Toxic Town: Birth Defects

  December 6, 2007

• Mail Call

  Unhappy Customer

  May 3, 2007

• Parish Predators

  Despite the bishop’s remarks to the contrary, the Galveston-Houston Roman Catholic Archdiocese had child molesters and let them go. But don’t blame just the Church.

  August 17, 2006

• Money for Nothing

  Hopeful beggars shake their virtual cups online

  April 20, 2006

• Road Trip

  How a mid-list band spent six weeks in an RV, fueled by chili

  November 10, 2005

• Against All Odds

  A group of unsupervised mental patients running from Katrina made it from New Orleans to Houston. Victor Fruge led the way.

  November 3, 2005

• Letters

  July 28, 2005

• Critical Condition

  Expect the Iraq war to worsen the Medical Center's reduction in Arab patients

  April 3, 2003

• Getting THMPed

  Activists fight the state's plan to slash drug help for HIV patients

  January 23, 2003

• Med Check

  Texas can't decide whether to pay for drug-resistance tests that could prolong the lives of those with HIV. For John Termine, it's already too late.

  July 4, 2002

• Common Cents

  Area housing for the mentally ill remains deplorable, but a state subsidy might improve conditions

  June 20, 2002

• Con's Con

  A contained experiment in Medicaid finally gets uncovered

  June 6, 2002

• Letters, Week of November 22

  Fed Up with Feds, Still Reeling, Diabolical Docs

  November 22, 2001

• Paying the Price

  Hospital district officials wanted a simple one-sentence policy on immigrant health care. What they got instead was a criminal probe and plenty of politics.

  October 11, 2001

• Letters

  Twin Piques, Fed Up, Gerda's Grief

  August 23, 2001

• Rx for Failure?

  MHMRA restricts Medicaid services at mental health clinic pharmacies

  August 2, 2001

• Blind Faith

  Luke and Rachel Watson have lost most of their sight. They eventually will lose all motor skills. Their parents are losing sleep -- do the adults tell their kids they're dying of Batten disease?

  June 14, 2001

• Upstairs Down - and Out?

  A money-starved mental health treatment unit may die in its infancy

  February 1, 2001

• Catch Us If You Can

  Steve Chesser went to MHMRA for help. Sent home from its emergency clinic without medicine or therapy, he shot his and killed himself. Diagnosis: A mental health care system in free fall.

  November 9, 2000

• Letters 09-14-2000

  Blowing Smoke, Pay to Play, Ill Will

  September 14, 2000

• Methadone Meltdown

  Dr. Amos and Cecilia Ozumba ran Houston Maintenance Clinic for four years. Have they finally run it into the ground?

  April 27, 2000

• Warded Off

  She got into a suspect nursing home. And the probate system got most of her money.

  April 20, 2000

• Drowning on Dry Land

  Rising asthma rates have experts scratching their heads - and children struggling to breathe

  February 3, 2000

• Downing

  Texas Lottery. Let's buy our tickets and bet on the day that Robert Arthur Pearson finally kills himself in public while we all watch

  November 25, 1999

• Strangers in Paradise

  Kosovar refugees in Houston fight to hang on in a land they don't understand

  October 28, 1999

• Dangerous Deficits

  Mental health cuts may come back to haunt the public

  August 19, 1999

• Ana's Angel

  Jay Hamburger rushed in where others feared to tread ... only to find that no good deed goes unpunished

  April 4, 1996

• Old and In The Way

  December 16, 1993

• The Recruit

  June 11, 2009

• Refugees In Houston Struggle With The Health-Care System Even More Than The Rest Of Us

  A Bhutanese refugee has been holed up in his southwest Houston apartment for months, downing pain killers. This isn't the new life he had in mind. Rubber sandals cover the mat outside the spare, dim apartment. The man is embedded in an easy chair. He periodically winces and grabs his stomach. The man, who is 40 with a delicate frame and thin black hair, asked not to be named. He and his family are of Nepali origin. They fled Bhutan in the 1990s during unrest over assimilation and spent 18

  June 19, 2009

• Psychologist's Fraud Arrest May Affect Trials He Testified In

  Photo courtesy Montgomery County Sheriff's OfficeMatthew Leddy, a local psychologist, was arrested late last month for theft and Medicaid fraud, accused of billing for work that he didn't perform, according to articles in the Houston Chronicle and the Conroe Courier. The articles don't mention, however, that Leddy was working for the Mental Health and Mental Retardation Authority of Harris County and testified in criminal trials that resulted in at least one man getting a lengthy prison sentence

  July 14, 2009

• There's A Whole Ton Of Cases That Might Be Affected By The Allegedly Fraudulent Expert

  Photo Courtesy of Montgomery County Sheriff's Office​Last month we reported on the arrest of Matthew Leddy, a psychologist working for the Mental Health and Mental Retardation Authority of Harris County. His arrest, for alleged Medicaid fraud and theft, caught our attention because he evaluated defendants in two criminal cases we wrote about last year. It turns out that Leddy did a lot more work than that, evaluating close to 1,000 defendants during his two and a half years working for MHMRA,

  August 7, 2009

• Conservatives Defend Whole Foods While Liberals Boycott

  Photo by That Other Paper​Irate progressives are calling for a boycott of Whole Foods after the health food store chain's founder John Mackey came out against Obama's efforts at reforming health care in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece last week. After stating his fears about socialized medicine, Mackey made a few suggestions of his own. "Recent scientific and medical evidence shows that a diet consisting of foods that are plant-based, nutrient dense and low-fat will help prevent and

  August 17, 2009

• Trying To Connect With Houston's Burmese Community, Via John Glenn

  Photo by Mike Giglio​I threw a football at a refugee and demanded to know where she lived.Her voice wavered, and her answer was hard to hear. So I leaned over and cupped my hand to my ear, waving the hand in a circle first, like Hulk Hogan trying to rile a crowd. Apartment 1212, I finally made out.I made the class repeat after me: "I live in apartment 1-2-1-2."On a July night in an apartment complex in southwest Houston, the makeshift classroom was full of Burmese. It was the first of a new a

  September 2, 2009

• The Burmese Come to Houston

  September 3, 2009