Desperate for addiction treatment, patients are pawns in lucrative insurance fraud scheme

Drug users, desperate to break addictions to heroin or pain pills, are pawns in a sprawling national network of insurance fraud, an investigation by STAT and the Boston Globe has found.

They are being sent to treatment centers hundreds of miles from home for expensive, but often shoddy, care that is paid for by premium health insurance benefits procured with fake addresses.

Patient brokers are paid a fee to place insured people in treatment centers, which pocket thousands of dollars in claims for each patient. They often target certain Blue Cross Blue Shield plans, because of their generous benefits and few restrictions on seeking care from out-of-network treatment programs.

The fraud is now so commonplace that brokers use a simple play on words to describe how it works: “Do you want to Blue Cross the country?”

Read more: The addict brokers: Middlemen profit as desperate patients are ‘treated like paychecks’

Patients from across the United States have been taken in by these profiteers capitalizing on the surge in opioid addiction. For Peter SanAngelo, hopeless and homeless after a decade of heroin use, the promise of free insurance and luxury rehab in another state was a lifeline. A patient broker used a phony address to enroll the Massachusetts man in a Pennsylvania Blue Cross plan and bought him a plane ticket to Florida. He was even promised money for cigarettes.

Three months later, the 33-year-old died of a drug overdose.

“This whole thing began from a place of deception,” said SanAngelo’s cousin Samantha Herring. “Peter had an honest desire to get better and they had an honest desire to make money.”

, some of whom are themselves in recovery