When we have a loved one that is terminally ill, it’s hard to watch them go into hospice care.
One Texas hospice care company made the experience even worse. According to the FBI, 34-year-old accountant Brad Harris was caught telling his nurses to give patients overdoses of morphine or other medicines.
He asked one nurse to facilitate an overdose for three patients. Luckily, the nurse resigned and refused to follow the order.
In 2013, another employee received text message orders from Harris ordering:
“increasing [a] patient’s medication dosage to approximately four times the maximum allowed.”
Harris founded the company in 2012. They have been under investigation since October of 2014. They took on patients that didn’t require their services, so they could bill the government for the unnecessary care provided.
If the patients were in hospice for too long he would direct his employees to “make them go bye-bye” via text messages. He also asked executives to find patients that would die within 24 hours. Hospice care facilities are required to reimburse Medicare/Medicaid if the patient’s hospice stay was longer than a determined amount of time.
The Novus group has not been charged yet, but their offices were raided. The officials found 18 DVDs worth of e-mails and 44 DVDs worth of conversations via subpoena.
An FBI affidavit said that Harris wished “this f***** would just die!”
He even had employees forging doctors’ signatures to get people moved from home care to their hospice. Here is the company’s motto from their website:
“We have a saying at Novus, be fast and treat people the way we would want to be treated. This encourages us to go the extra mile to make patients feel comfortable and secure about their special needs and requests.”
A hospice service wants to be fast? That’s not how that works. I hope this sick man needs to go to jail for a very long time. He does NOT need to be taking care of anyone. This is absolutely despicable! Trying to make extra money off the death of peoples’ loved ones is just plain sick!
Featured image by Rick Kimpel via flickr, available under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.
