A former healthcare inspection supervisor at Florida's Agency for Healthcare Administration was sentenced Friday to nearly five years in prison for accepting bribes in exchange for alerting a nursing home executive to state inspections and patient complaints, according to the Miami Herald.
Bertha Blanco — who was fired in late 2016 after working for the state agency for 30 years — admitted in a guilty plea that she accepted $100,000 in bribes from intermediaries who allegedly collaborated with Philip Esformes, the head of a network of Miami-Dade nursing homes.
Mr. Esformes used the information to fix the complaints and problems brought to the agency before state regulators inspected any of his 20 skilled nursing or assisted-living facilities. This information allowed Mr. Esformes to avoid losing Medicare contracts at his facilities and allowed him to continue to bill Medicare for questionable patient services.
Earlier this year, Mr. Esformes was arrested on charges of conspiring with other healthcare operators in a $1 billion Medicare fraud scheme.
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