Snyder’s lawyer, Bruce Zimet, said the case hasn’t been presented to a grand jury yet and that there are "significant facts" that point against indicting his client.
"He has literally saved the lives of many, many people who had gone through his facility in the past and were suffering from addiction issues," Zimet said. "We are hopeful that the government will keep an open mind and realize that while there’s a lot of abuse in the industry, Snyder is not one of those people who is an abuser."
Delray Beach
Southern Florida has the biggest concentration of residential treatment centers in the country -- hundreds are based mainly in single-family homes in and around Delray Beach, a small town in Palm Beach County, north of Miami. A December 2016 grand jury report commissioned by the State Attorney for Palm Beach County found addiction treatment centers to be rife with operators who use deceptive marketing, illegal patient brokering and fraudulent insurance claims to profit from addicts.
The report found treatment centers and half-way houses, known as sober homes, operate out of strip malls and house addicts recruited from around the country, charging their private insurers thousands of dollars a day for questionable treatment. Many residential facilities are “unsafe and overcrowded ‘flophouses’ where crimes like rape, theft, human trafficking, prostitution and illegal drug use are commonplace,” the report found. “Over the past decade, bad actors have been using these laws to hide exploitation of the very people these laws were meant to protect,” the report concluded. This year, the Florida legislature passed a law that seeks to regulate and prohibit deceptive marketing practices in opiate addiction treatment services.
‘Preying’ on People
The centers are "preying on some of the most vulnerable people," said Deb Herzog, a retired Anthem investigator and former prosecutor who examined such centers in California. "They’re not providing treatment and they’re collecting a lot of money."
Fraudulent claims became so rampant that Cigna, the fourth-biggest U.S. health insurer, quit Florida’s Obamacare market in the fall of 2015, ahead of the sign-up period for 2016 plans. At the time, the company blamed fraudulent and abusive practices by drug-treatment centers for driving up its costs.
"You do not have to be a rocket scientist to defraud the insurance companies, they make it so easy," said Herzog. "The insurance company has no idea what services if any are being provided, there’s no itemization. In my humble opinion, that’s the insurance industry’s fault."
While Sessions plans to highlight the opioid treatment fraud, federal prosecutors have already brought cases in this space. In May, Kenneth Chatman, the owner of a Florida sober home, was sentenced to more than 27 years after pleading guilty to health-care fraud, money laundering and human trafficking. That case exposed a scheme where Chatman used drug addicts as sex slaves while receiving insurance money meant for treatment programs.