Medicare Fraud? Child Custody Violations? How the prosecution muddied the waters.
In addition to the false arrest for child custody issues, The Tallahassee Democrat, as well as other newspapers, reported at the time that Dr. Frasch was guilty of Medicare fraud. Despite that the federal investigation ended with the charges being dropped, this story persisted.
In fact, Dr. Frasch was owed money by Medicare and Medicaid, the state-assistance for people with low incomes, the elderly and the disabled. Over his 20+ year career, Dr. Frasch had to write off 8 figures-worth of unpaid medical care and surgery. And patient’s bills were written off when they couldn’t afford to pay.
But when Dr. Frasch appeared before a Grand Jury, prosecutor Georgia Cappleman told them he had committed Medicare fraud and was billing for more patients than he could see in a day. That wasn’t even the allegation. Dr. Frasch had been treating a wound care issue of an elderly diabetic patient who had said she did not remember being treated on certain dates due to her dementia/Alzheimers.
The media, following Georgia Cappleman’s lead, reported how much money Dr. Frasch had received from Medicare without explaining the procedure he was doing to merit that money. Working in Thomas County, Georgia which had the highest number of diabetics per capita, Dr. Frasch did a lot of wound care, a procedure that would range from $50 to $170 depending on the size and depth of the wound. He did nearly 500 of these procedures a year. It required a $1590 graft for each procedure and there were times when Dr. Frasch was stuck with the cost of the graft if the patient didn’t show up or if Medicare didn’t pay. In fact, the Federal audit showed that Medicare owed him over 2.7 million dollars.
The cutting-edge wound care work that Dr. Frasch was doing saved patients from potential amputation down the road which is far more costly to Medicare than wound treatment.
Had his patients gone to a hospital rather than to his clinic, Medicare would have had to pay out even more because hospital procedures include additional fees that can turn $1590 + $170 into upwards of $10,000 to $15,000 per procedure.
The custody of Dr. Frasch’s two young daughters also became an unnecessary issue. Dr. Frasch had full custody of his children because eight months earlier Samira had been arrested for domestic assault. Nonetheless, he ended up incarcerated on charges of violating a child custody order. When he was released, he took his family home to Nebraska but had to fly back to Florida to face a Grand Jury where Cappleman continued to twist the truth. He had already passed a polygraph test but he wasn’t permitted to share that information with jurors.
Instead, he had to listen while Cappleman distorted his life, turning it into one of lies and excess. Even small things were twisted. He had told investigators that had seen two empty bottles of champagne on the kitchen counter. In the trial we see these two bottles in a photo. But the Grand Jury was told there were no open bottles in the house. And that Dr. Frasch had said that Samira had consumed two bottles of champagne when the toxicology report said she had no alcohol in her system. It was no surprise that the Grand Jury indicted him on a charge of first-degree murder.
Another sensational element in it all was that Dr. Frasch was supposedly using his wife’s insurance money to fund his legal team. No one seemed to stop to consider that the insurance company had actually paid out the $1 million. They had conducted their own objective investigation and determined that he was innocent. That alone should have caused people to stop and think carefully about Dr. Frasch’s persistent insistence that he was innocent. No insurance company handles that kind of a claim without being certain of their findings.
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