Chapter 34

"LTACH fraud." Harry said. "A special kind of fraud with its own category. Every law has a financial purpose for someone. That's the way it is when the entire government is for sale. Back in the late 90s a carve-out in the federal budget created that class of hospitals. Long-term acute care. They're more profitable, get paid more for some things. So naturally the operators find ways to exploit them."

"ACCH is an LTACH?" Jessica asked.

"Right. Apparently, like nursing homes, a lot of them are pretty shady. This one sure looks like it.

"I don't know how much you know about it - I didn't until recently - but it looks real dodgy, even without the stuff I've learned lately.

"The facility was built sometime back in the '60s, it was the Methodist Hospital then. It was one that got bought back when some big operators were buying up hospitals, most weren't non-profit back then. There was big one in Tennessee, you might have heard about it. Big rich family, started a big hospital operation. The old man was a doctor, so was his son. He got elected to the Senate. You can guess how that worked.

"He was still in the senate when it blew up, they got busted for Medicare fraud. Him being a senator they got off easier, no one went to prison. But they paid over a billion in fines, so you can imagine how much they actually stole."

"I can try." Jessica said.

"Right." Harry said. "It must have been seriously big. Anyway, the company reorganized, probably to adjust for the losses and to eliminate any further digging. Anyway, big companies that own a lot of hospitals, there's a few of them. There's one in Texas that interests me.

"The Methodist hospital closed after one of those big scandals, the parent company sold off some and closed others of its facilities. It sat empty for years. Then about four or five years ago it was bought by a group of investors - I'm still trying to track that down - and they opened up a hospital. Continued Care Hospital, sounds real nice. What it amounts to is a dumping ground for the other hospitals. They don't want problem patients that need a lot of attention for a long time. It's also a good way to shift blame.

"They screwed up good over at St. Bernards, whatever it was. Mary Ann can't make any sense out of whats in those records, how it could have happened. They were looking a a bad situation.

"So they send Alex over to ACCH, ostensibly for recovery, but mainly to distance themselves from any consequences."

"Thinking I'd die," Alex said, "or at least never wake up."

"That's the general idea." Harry said. "You were already considered a hopeless case, ACCH had little, really nothing to lose. It would be hard, and will be, to prove they were negligent if you died, or never got better. Plausible deniability."

"You didn't cooperate." Jessica said with a wry smile. "I don't understand though, how they could have been that incompetent. I have trouble believing it."

"It's possible that they were," Harry said, "but not all that likely. It's a low-buck operation for sure, and their doctors are most likely near the bottom of the scale. Like the priests who rape boys, and the church moves them around to keep them from being exposed, the same thing happens in the medical industry. Bad doctors find a place to hide from the consequences of their failures and continue doing it.

"But there may be something else."

Not sure I want to hear this.

"That doesn't sound good." Jessica said.

"It isn't. I have an associate down in Texas, worked as a fed liaison for a few years. FBI, DEA, all those agencies. In this business we make relationships that outlast our career work. I talked to him a little yesterday, he's supposed to get back to me when he has something on them.

"He says the body parts business is a serious problem in the medical industry. Bigger than anyone realizes."

What?

"Body parts." Jessica said. "That not only doesn't sound good... I'm literally feeling sick."

So am I.

"It's pretty much under the radar here. Not like China, where they can just round up people and incarcerate them, cut them up and sell the parts. Little harder to do here, but the temptation is strong. Lot of money."

"How does it happen here?" Jessica asked."

"It requires a little more work, but with the right organization, you can do it pretty easily on a large scale. Obviously things like hearts and lungs are a problem, but kidneys, livers, corneas... not so much."

"I remember, years ago," Jessica said, "hearing about poor people in third world countries selling their kidneys."

"That's still big. Of course you got two kidneys, so desperate people who will do it aren't that hard to find. But when you think about having a whole body, there's a lot of money there. By the time you sell the organs, along with bone, skin..."

"I got it. Stop."

"That could be what we're looking at here."