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Before O’CONNOR, Associate Justice,*fn1 CARNES and ANDERSON, Circuit Judges.

Dr. Ana Alvarez and Nurse Sandra Mateos were employees at St. Jude Rehabilitation Center during its brief time as an operating clinic in 2003. St. Jude was ostensibly an HIV treatment center, but it was established as a front for a massive Medicare scam. The fraud involved falsely diagnosing patients with a condition that would justify treatments of WinRho, an expensive drug reimbursable by Medicare at a rate of about $4,900 per treatment to St. Jude. Because the treatment was medically unnecessary, employees at St. Jude would purchase only a small fraction of the drugs and drug treatments for which they billed Medicare. They would then use a simple saline solution or an extremely diluted dose of WinRho to inject patients, thereby pocketing much of the money that Medicare had paid for the WinRho treatments. All of the patients were HIV-positive Medicare beneficiaries who had been recruited for the purpose of seeking WinRho treatments they did not actually need. The patients were typically paid about $150 per visit in exchange for their knowing participation. During the approximately five-month span in which this scam continued, St. Jude received more than $8 million from Medicare.

 
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