Compassionate Homecare, a home health company, will pay $6.53 million to resolve a lawsuit that alleged it billed MassHealth for services that were not authorized by a physician.
The Massachusetts attorney general sued Compassionate in 2018, alleging the company stole millions of dollars from MassHealth, the state's Medicaid program, according to a March 24 attorney general's office news release. The settlement was approved by the U.S. Bankruptcy Court.
Compassionate and its owner, Francis Kimaru, pleaded guilty in September 2019 to separate criminal charges brought by the attorney general office's Medicaid fraud division. As part of that plea, Kimaru and Compassionate admitted to stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars from MassHealth by routinely overbilling and falsely billing for services that were not authorized or provided to patients. Compassionate filed for bankruptcy in May 2020.
In addition to the $6.53 million settlement payment, $375,000 is being set aside for payment of unpaid wages to former Compassionate employees, according to the news release.