Body brokers unlawfully profit off of vulnerable members of society

Earlier this year, an emerging and troubling societal problem got the Hollywood treatment. In the movie "Body Brokers," a person addicted to drugs is brought to Los Angeles for treatment. He soon learns the facility treating him does not exist to rehabilitate people. Instead, it provides cover for a multibillion-dollar fraud scheme where addicted people recruit other addicted people to seek treatment at the facility.

While the crime thriller included its fair share of creative embellishments to pump up its entertainment value, the premise of the movie is, unfortunately, all too real.

As you read this sentence, there are addiction treatment facilities in Southern California (and across the United States) actively using "body brokers" to recruit people addicted to drugs as new patients. Body brokers, and the people who employ them, prey on vulnerable members of society whom they deem expendable and who cannot fend for themselves.

(There are so many addiction treatment facilities in Southern California competing for patients that the area is pejoratively known as the "Rehab Riviera.")

Fortunately for victims of body brokers and their families, recent court proceedings show California's courthouse doors are open to them as they seek justice for the wrongs perpetrated against them.

What Is a Body Broker?

A body broker sells addicted people to addiction treatment facilities by referring them to those facilities in exchange for kickbacks. The broker may lure an addicted person with cash, gift cards, drugs, or any other item of value. The broker then steers the addicted person to a particular facility. Almost certainly unbeknownst to that person, the facility might pay that broker upwards of $10,000 for that referral.

Unfortunately for addicted people caught up in a body brokers scheme, they are unlikely to be referred to a reputable, law-abiding facility. California does not require owners of addiction treatment facilities to have a medical license. On top of that, the Affordable Care Act requires insurers to provide coverage of addiction treatment services.

This combination is a potent recipe for abuse. Knowing that insurers must cover their services, unscrupulous addiction treatment facilities provide medically unnecessary treatments to patients and falsify billing documents. Facilities' staff may work with associates outside of their facility to provide drugs to newly sober people to get them re-addicted, and then readmit them to the facility.

Addiction treatment facilities profit handsomely when using body brokers. The cost of a patient's stay can top $1,000 a day; many patients stay for weeks. Unnecessary or billed-but-not-administered treatments can increase that amount exponentially. But the societal costs of body brokers is greater. Yes, their use can increase the cost of health insurance. But more important, they can prevent addicted people from beating addiction and even cause them to fatally overdose.

Seeking Justice for Victims of Body Brokers

In Southern California, recent legal proceedings show that people using body brokers, and body brokers themselves, are being held legally accountable for their actions.

In July 2020, the Orange County District Attorney's Office charged Beverly Hills surgeon Randy Rosen with 88 felony counts in two separate cases related to a $52-million insurance fraud scheme that relied on body brokers. According to the criminal complaints, Rosen recruited and hired body brokers to find and pay patients to receive medically unnecessary cortisone shots and have Naltrexone implant surgeries. (Naltrexone is a prescription drug used to manage opioid abuse. It should not, however, be given to people currently using opioids because it blocks the "high" provided by opioids, resulting in larger, fatal dosages.)

Rosen then allegedly billed insurers approximately $600 million for these unnecessary procedures. Rosen also allegedly required patients to take drug tests he sent to a lab owned by his girlfriend that allegedly fraudulently billed at least 22 different insurers more than $3 million. If Rosen is convicted, he faces up to approximately 84 years in prison.

While Rosen awaits his criminal trial, he was named a defendant in a wrongful death lawsuit filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court this past March by the parents of 25-year-old Nathan Lynch. According to the complaint, Rosen injected Lynch with experimental Naltrexone treatments on numerous occasions between 2017 and 2019 even though Lynch was not a candidate for the treatments. Lynch died of a heroin and fentanyl overdose in April 2020 while receiving treatment at Los Angeles-based Exis Recovery, Inc., another defendant in the lawsuit.

Also this past March, the FBI arrested a Santa Ana man, Darius Jarell Moore, alleging he was a body broker for four Orange County addiction treatment facilities: Mission Viejo-based Get Real Recovery, Huntington Beach-based Healing Path Detox and Healing Path Recovery, and Laguna Hills-based Stone Ridge Recovery and Landmark Recovery. Moore allegedly received over $400,000 in kickbacks from the owners of the four facilities. Moore was charged under the relatively new Eliminating Kickbacks in Recovery Act, a federal statute signed into law in 2018. If convicted, he faces up to 10 years in federal prison.

Prosecutors and Private Attorneys Must Lead the Charge to Combat Body Brokers

As with many societal problems, lawyers -- both in public and private practice -- need to be at the tip of the spear combatting body brokers.

According to the OC Register, there are 16 inspectors based out of Sacramento assigned to monitor roughly 2,000 addiction treatment facilities in California. That's about one inspector for every 125 facilities in a state that spans about 160,000 square miles. Additionally, consumer complaints about licensed treatment facilities nearly doubled from 2013 to 2016.

With California's administrative state seemingly ill-equipped to make meaningful progress against body brokers, the brightest hope victims of body brokers and their families have for holding body brokers and the people who use them legally liable for their actions is the state's legal system. Through civil actions and criminal proceedings, members of the California Bar are best positioned to stop body brokers and their preying on vulnerable members of society.