A teenager died on a basketball court 24 days after a cardiologist certified his heart test results as normal – a review that, according to the DOJ’s case summaries, took approximately 11 seconds and covered 63 cardiac images. That case is now at the center of the largest set of healthcare fraud charges ever filed by the U.S. Department of Justice.
On June 23, 2026, the Trump administration announced the results of a two-week enforcement sweep called the 2026 National Health Care Fraud Takedown. The operation ran simultaneously across 56 federal districts, pulling in defendants from Florida to Texas to Arizona to California, and reached overseas to Cyprus, Estonia, and the Philippines. Prosecutors allege that in multiple cases, patients were harmed or killed because the fraud required that genuine medical care be replaced with nothing.
The healthcare fraud charges named 455 defendants in total, including 90 doctors and other licensed medical professionals. The false claims they allegedly submitted to Medicare, Medicaid, and other federal health programs totaled over $6.5 billion, with schemes involving significant patient harm, including death. Cases were filed across 56 federal districts and 45 U.S. states and territories, with 50 state Medicaid Fraud Control Units participating – the most in Justice Department history.
The Largest Fraud Takedown in Justice Department History
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche announced the results at a press conference alongside Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and CMS Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz. “This year’s National Health Care Fraud Takedown represents the greatest whole-of-government effort to combat health care fraud in our Nation’s history,” Blanche said, adding: “This is just the beginning. Fraudsters can no longer rip off American taxpayers.”
International cooperation added a further dimension to the operation. Two defendants were apprehended in Estonia in connection with a previously charged $10.6 billion scheme. One defendant in Kyrenia, Cyprus, was linked to a scheme exceeding $3.7 billion. In the Philippines, Herb Kimble – one of the FBI’s Most Wanted Fraudsters – was captured in connection with a $1.2 billion telemedicine fraud scheme just four days after being added to the list.
The 2026 takedown also set a record for Medicaid fraud enforcement, with 295 defendants charged and over $518 million in false Medicaid claims – the largest number of Medicaid fraud defendants and the largest Medicaid loss the Justice Department has ever charged in a single action.
The Cardiologist Who Certified a Dead Patient’s Heart as Normal
The most disturbing individual case involves Dr. Jason Finkelstein, 53, a board-certified cardiologist from Fort Worth, Texas. Finkelstein was charged by indictment with conspiracy to commit healthcare fraud and wire fraud in connection with an $89 million cardiovascular testing scheme. He was licensed to practice in 48 states and served as medical director of a Florida-based cardiovascular testing company.
The DOJ’s indictment alleges Finkelstein billed insurers for medically unnecessary cardiovascular screening tests for college student-athletes and rubber-stamped the results as normal without personally reviewing them, sometimes approving test results within seconds despite knowing some athletes had possible cardiac abnormalities.
The alleged fraud ran from 2019 through the end of 2025. Finkelstein’s co-conspirators emailed athletic trainers at colleges and universities claiming the tests could identify any life-threatening condition that might prevent students from playing, and offered kickbacks and other inducements to school officials to refer potential patients. Because insurance companies require a documented medical necessity before covering cardiovascular screening, the indictment alleges Finkelstein submitted phony diagnoses – including elevated blood pressure and hypertension – that the athletes did not actually have.
In October 2024, Finkelstein signed off on the cardiovascular tests of one student athlete as “normal” approximately 11 seconds after accessing 63 testing images, though those tests showed signs of potential abnormalities, including possible right atrial and right ventricular hypertrophy (enlargement of the heart’s right chambers). Twenty-four days later, that student athlete died from sudden cardiac arrest during a basketball workout. Even after being informed of the student’s death and receiving allegations from his mother that Finkelstein’s medical clearance contributed to it, the DOJ says he continued signing cardiac tests as normal for other athletes without review.
Finkelstein pleaded not guilty during a court appearance in Florida and has retained legal representation. Dr. Oz, commenting on the case at the press conference, said: “There is no way they could miss that, except they didn’t care.”
A $906 Million Wound-Care Scheme – and a Ferrari to Match
The second major individual case centers on Marizel Yukee, a 49-year-old nurse practitioner from Las Vegas, Nevada, charged in the Southern District of Texas. According to the DOJ’s Southern District of Texas announcement, she faces charges in a $906 million scheme in which she allegedly applied medically unnecessary allografts (biological skin substitutes used to treat chronic wounds) and billed Medicare more than $1 million per patient on average.
Between October 2023 and April 2026, Yukee and unnamed co-conspirators allegedly submitted more than $906 million in fraudulent claims to Medicare and TRICARE – the federal health insurance covering military members and their families – through four wound-care companies she owned. The government paid out approximately $297 million of those claims before the scheme was detected.
The scheme centered on allografts bioengineered from donated placental tissue. The indictment alleges her clinics applied those grafts to wounds that were already healed, infected and ineligible for treatment, or to patients who had no qualifying wounds at all. In some cases, hospice patients received grafts and died within days.
Seized assets tell the financial story of the alleged fraud. The government seized over $30 million in bank accounts, a $594,000 Ferrari 296 GTS, seven other high-end vehicles, an $865,000 custom Bulgari necklace, and $1 million worth of other luxury jewelry. The indictment further alleges that fraud proceeds funded the construction of a $4.6 million beach resort in the Philippines.
How a Wound-Care Product Became a $4 Billion Billing Machine
Yukee’s case was not the only allograft fraud in this takedown. Charges were filed against 11 defendants across six federal districts in connection with billions in fraudulent claims for amniotic wound allografts. In Arizona, the vice president of sales for a company that sold allografts was charged in a nationwide kickback scheme. Between December 2021 and June 2024, providers billed Medicare over $4 billion for that company’s allografts, resulting in over $2 billion in payments.
The company did not manufacture allografts itself. Instead, it acquired them from tissue banks and relabeled them for sale at a 2,000 percent markup, charging up to $1,450 per square centimeter.
The scale of allograft billing had direct consequences for ordinary Medicare recipients. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) cut Medicare’s payment for allografts to $127 per square centimeter starting January 1, 2026. Had CMS not intervened, the spike in allograft payments alone would have raised the Part B premium – the monthly amount Medicare enrollees pay – by an extra $11 per month for every beneficiary in the country, according to the DOJ’s official press release.
You can read more about how hospice billing fraud has grown into one of Medicare’s most persistent vulnerabilities in our earlier investigation:
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Other Schemes: The Homeless, the Dead, and Fake Diagnoses
Fraud involving deceased patients appeared in multiple jurisdictions. In one hospice case, defendant Oren David Shachar allegedly generated $27.7 million in fraudulent Medicare claims by using deceased beneficiaries’ identities and creating backdated medical records, billing Medicare approximately $26.9 million of which was paid, according to the DOJ case summaries. A separate California hospice owner allegedly paid kickbacks to a funeral home employee in exchange for the names and Medicare information of recently deceased patients, then billed Medicare for hospice services never rendered.
An Illinois behavioral health case alleged $67 million in false Medicaid claims for mental health services that were never provided. In another case, a mental health company owner allegedly recruited homeless individuals into crisis stabilization programs they never participated in, then billed Medicaid for the phantom services.
The FBI also added two fugitives to its Most Wanted Fraudsters list during the takedown: Khalid Ahmed Satary, linked to an alleged $547 million genetic testing scheme and believed to be in the United Arab Emirates; and Emylee Thai, a former lab owner whose company allegedly billed Medicare roughly $142 million and collected approximately $95 million, now believed to be in Vietnam after cutting off her ankle monitor and fleeing on a private charter using a fake passport.
How the Government Is Changing Its Approach to Catching Fraud
The Justice Department’s Fraud Division and CMS announced an agreement to deploy advanced data analytics algorithms and artificial intelligence tools directly within CMS’s cloud computing environment, giving investigators real-time visibility into billing patterns across the entire Medicare system. The administration described this as a formal shift away from a “pay and chase” model – in which Medicare pays claims and then tries to recover fraudulent payments – toward technology that flags suspicious billing before money goes out the door.
That shift produced real results in this takedown. The Health Care Fraud Unit’s Data Analytics Team detected the spike in allograft payments specifically, which led directly to the prosecutions. HHS’s Office of Inspector General separately initiated actions seeking more than $10 billion in payments to the Medicare Trust Fund from payments that CMS caught and suspended before the funds were paid out to fraudulent providers.
CMS also suspended 1,079 providers and revoked billing privileges for an additional 1,403 providers as part of the operation. Investigators seized over $182 million in cash, luxury vehicles, jewelry, and other assets from defendants across the country.
Keep Your Guard Up: What Beneficiaries Can Do Now
If you’re a Medicare or Medicaid beneficiary, a large portion of the money these schemes extracted came directly out of the Medicare Trust Fund – and, by extension, from the premiums and taxes that fund it. The $11-per-month premium increase that CMS prevented by cutting allograft reimbursement rates was a direct cost that would have fallen on every Medicare Part B enrollee in the country.
The cases reach into home health, hospice, wound care, telehealth, and behavioral health – the same settings where millions of Americans receive care every day – and several allegations describe direct patient harm, including death. A student athlete’s family trusted a cardiologist to review their son’s heart test. The DOJ alleges that doctor spent 11 seconds on it.
The clearest practical step for any beneficiary is to request and review an Explanation of Benefits (EOB) – a summary Medicare or your insurer mails after any service is billed. If you see a service, test, or procedure you don’t recognize, contact Medicare at 1-800-MEDICARE or your insurer’s fraud hotline. Fraudulent billing to Medicare is a federal crime you can report directly to the HHS Office of Inspector General, which runs a hotline at 1-800-HHS-TIPS. The 2026 takedown was the largest of its kind. According to the Justice Department, it won’t be the last.
AI Disclaimer: This article was created with the assistance of AI tools and reviewed by a human editor.
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