The jailed owner of the Hemorrhoid Relief Centers of Pittsburgh is set to plead guilty today in Columbus, Ohio, to multiple charges in connection with his role as an orchestrator of one of the largest health care fraud cases in the United States.
Markell D. Boulis, 45, a former chiropractor from Collier who ran seminars across the country designed to illegally boost revenue for chiropractic practices, has informed federal authorities that he will enter a plea in two federal cases in Pittsburgh and Columbus.
Court papers indicate Mr. Boulis and the various corporate entities he controlled will admit to running a complex false billing scheme for hundreds of chiropractors from 1999 through 2003, when he went to jail for cocaine dealing in Cleveland that violated his probation from an old drug case outside Atlanta. He also has indicated he will plead guilty to tax evasion and health care fraud in connection with his three Hemorrhoid Relief Centers in the region, which he ran with his wife, Angel.
Mr. Boulis patterned his company on Practice Mechanix, a firm he ran in South Florida with a fellow Scientologist, David Gorroway, until the two split in a money dispute in 2001. The men had based their seminars on business models taught by the Church of Scientology. On his own, investigators said, Mr. Boulis offered chiropractors an $8,000 package of services that promised to increase their collections dramatically by using extra billing codes to charge insurance companies for past treatments, a practice called "back-billing." Back-billing is sometimes legal, but only to correct previous billing errors for treatments rendered. Mr. Boulis submitted back-bills for every patient in a chiropractor's office, and usually for treatments never provided.
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/06097/680148-85.stm
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