They find their targets at meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous, at treatment centers for drug abusers or at so-called “sober houses,” where recovering addicts stay while trying to kick the habit.
Then they swoop in for the kill.
As long as their insurance holds out, addicts and alcoholics are being bought, sold and traded among “body brokers,” treatment centers and sober houses like slaves, whipped by misery and wearing the manacles of their addictions.
Many of these places don’t want to cure them—they want to perpetuate their addictions; if the addicts remain enslaved to this broken system as long as possible, the insurance money keeps flowing in. Often, they pay body brokers—often large amounts of money—to provide new addicts for the centers.
No matter how severe the legal penalties are, there is no question it’s still happening.
The 2018 passage of the federal Eliminating Kickbacks in Recovery Act and a host of state laws against patient brokering were supposed to stop the practice. They didn’t. It’s not even unheard of for treatment centers to give “patients” drugs to keep them there.
Want proof? Los Angeles man Casey Mahoney, owner of two treatment centers, was convicted earlier this month of paying body brokers $2.87 million between 2018 and 2020. Those brokers, in turn, gave thousands of dollars to addicts to lure them to Mahoney’s “treatment” centers, where he could rake in insurance. Some of the money even went to buy the addicts drugs.
Why? The Affordable Care Act of 2008 requires insurance companies to pay for substance abuse treatment as well as medical tests.
John Swab, director of the 2021 movie Body Brokers, which exposed the dark side of rehabilitation centers, said, “Since the bill was passed, nearly 2,000 sober livings, 100 in-patient treatment centers and 200 detox facilities have opened up just in Southern California alone. That is nearly 35,000 beds that need to be filled each month, and almost 500,000 that need to be filled each year.”
That’s a profit of $12 billion a year in just one region of one state—a powerful motivation to fill those beds, regardless of what the law says.
Swab said that treatment centers’ incentive is not “to get somebody well. It’s to keep them there as long as they can and milk them for all the money that insurance will pay out.”
In April, Scott Raffa, owner of three treatment centers in California, was arrested and charged with paying body brokers $174,600 over one and a half years to keep him supplied with patients.
In 2022, Lauren B. Philhower of Los Angeles and Anastasia A. Passas of Bentonville, Arkansas, pled guilty to a multistate patient brokering scheme to rope addicts into their treatment facilities. Itching to get their fingers into insurance policy coffers, they were paying brokers $5,000 to $10,000 per patient.
The practice is alive and well in Hollywood, too.
That same year, Allan Jarboe pled guilty in Palm Beach County, Florida, to seven counts of body brokering. He was sentenced to six years in prison.
Also in 2022, Thomas Ralph Stanley of Stuart, Florida, was arrested after fleeing to the Bahamas. He was found on a boat called “Chillin’ Like a Villain” and was charged with 53 counts of patient brokering. Stanley pled guilty and was sentenced to five years in prison.
Stanley is said to have defrauded insurance companies to the tune of $141 million over two years.
In three years, the Palm Beach County Sober Homes Task Force filed 100 criminal cases against 87 individuals, resulting in 43 resolved cases and 39 convictions.
No matter how many laws have been passed, no matter how many body brokers have been arrested and jailed, and no matter how severe the legal penalties are, there is no question it’s still happening—and the availability of huge profits keeps body brokers willing to risk arrest and prison.
The practice is alive and well in Hollywood, too.
Kelly Osbourne, daughter of wild-man heavy metal rocker and TV star Ozzy Osbourne, had drug addictions that sent her to rehab seven times. She became well acquainted with the techniques of body brokers, who even included staff members of the treatment centers she was in.
“They’ll sit outside of AA meetings looking for weak and vulnerable people that they encourage to go and relapse so they can then pick them up again. I swear on everything that it is true,” she said, “and it is heartbreaking.”
Michael Lohan, father of actress Lindsay Lohan, was arrested in 2021 for patient brokering, and was placed on four years’ probation.
Kenneth A. Polite Jr., then assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s criminal division, said, “These schemes take advantage of vulnerable members of our society—addiction patients seeking help.”
Like the Edenic serpent handing a glistening apple to a naïve Eve, the vultures use a tempting pitch that a struggling addict or alcoholic finds nearly impossible to refuse: “Come with us. We know of a great treatment center that can help you. We’ll even pay you. And we can get you drugs.”
Addicts take a bite of that apple and find themselves falling down a bottomless pit, into centers which milk their insurance dry, often with phony claims for tests and treatments that are never even performed.
It’s a massive fraud. And the government hasn’t put a dent in it yet.
Just ask Casey Mahoney, the man they convicted this month.
