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Johnson is among 33 people charged so far in a large-scale investigation that has opened a window into an emerging class of suppliers in the illicit drug trade: medical patients, including many who rely on the publicly funded Medicaid program to pay for their appointments and prescriptions. She has pleaded not guilty.
Often at no charge, the patients see a doctor, or several doctors, and come away with prescriptions for narcotic OxyContin and other pills they then sell to a dealer for as much as $1,000. If they are on Medicaid, the program is billed about $1,060 for a typical 60-pill, 80-mg prescription, along with the $23-to-$39 cost of the doctor's visit.
A report last year by the Government Accountability Office estimated that 65,000 Medicaid beneficiaries in New York and four other states had visited six or more doctors in fiscal 2006 and 2007 to acquire duplicate prescriptions for controlled substances.
The cost to Medicaid was $63 million for the drugs alone, excluding doctors' exams. The report examined Medicaid abuse in New York, California, Illinois, North Carolina and Texas, high-volume states in Medicaid prescription drug payments.
The New York Office of Medicaid Inspector General restricts recipients to coverage for a single doctor and single pharmacy if doctor-shopping is suspected, spokeswoman Wanda Fischer said. Nearly 10,000 New York recipients are currently on restricted status, she said.
"We're not allowed to drop them from the Medicaid program unless we prove a crime has happened," Fischer said.
