At Last!

     At last!  
     The government has filed its Complaint against me.
     One month ago the government was forced by a new judge to unseal the case and back it, or fold its cards.  Judge Mickel had retired, and the new judge probably stared at her inheritance, a docket full of aging cases like mine, and said:  let's clean house.  She ordered the government to make a move.  She was granting no more every-90-day extensions.
     So, case was unsealed about a month ago.  As I had expected, it was a whistleblower lawsuit filed more than three years ago by Pat McCullough, the woman who bought my Hawthorne Medical Center on March 12, 2009.   As I explained in earlier posts, this woman, an RN who hadn't practiced her nursing trade in many years, had no intention of running a medical clinic in rural Florida.  She hailed from Kentucky, raised race-horses, had no family ties or other connections to Florida, and may have intended to make a quick buck and beat it back to her ranch near Lexington, KY.  She never relocated to Hawthorne, and made only superficial moves to direct the clinic to continue serving patients in the respectable manner it had been doing for ten years.
     Instead, McCullough's motive was likely a purely self-serving one:  she wanted the assets of the clinic, and she planned to use the clinic's good name and sterling credit to cash in at whatever banks had loan officers she could trick into buying her hard-luck story ("I only want to help these poor, rural folks who need a clinic, but Dr. Colasante left me with a mess...").  It worked!  She obtained loans she would never repay
.    She certainly didn't pay me for the clinic purchase.  But her plan to destroy me went far beyond not paying, and was more clever than boring foreclosure.  I just wanted to assume ownership of the flagging clinic, when I saw it being destroyed, step by calculated step, a few months after her takeover. 
     Pat hired new billing people (including a woman who shortly afterward was arrested for embezzling funds from the Cardiology department at Marion Hospital) and sequestered them away in a storage shed --now outfitted with air conditioning and a lock on the door.  She must have given them instructions to collect as much of the accounts receivable (money still owed by patients and insurance companies to the clinic) as possible, and identify (or falsify?) documentation or coding infractions she could report to the federal government in a whistleblower claim designed to bamboozle its agents into thinking a) she was heroic--saving America's tax dollars!--and b) I was a criminal, perpetrating fraud against Medicare at every turn.
     Pat McCullough's claim was filed.  I will copy and paste it for your perusal in my next blog post.
     The government was given 20 days to decide whether to back that lawsuit, alter it in accordance with its agents suspicions, or jump ship. 
     The government's prosecutor, perhaps a determined and ambitious man, decided to back the case and file it, but he altered the allegations.
     The case against me is 28 pages long, and contains 110 complaints.
     I have been instructed by my lawyers to formulate responses to these complaints.
     The complaints are absurd, outrageous, and false. 
     How do you respond when someone lies about you?  And what if that person fabricates evidence to substantiate the lies?  I don't know if this is what she did, but it seems logical. 
     I'd like to think I could depend on intelligent investigators (the friendly men-in-blue policemen of my childhood, the ones who rescue kittens from trees) to ferret out truth from fiction.  But I don't know. 
     The news these days is full of stories about civil forfeitures:  millions of people, over the past decade, getting stopped and frisked on the streets of New York City, and their belongings taken into custody and never returned;  drivers on certain highways being stopped, because they fit a certain "profile," and having their cars searched and ransacked and their belongings confiscated by the police, never to be returned (in cases titled "State of Texas v. $6,037" or "United States v. One Pearl Necklace," or "United States v. Adams' Residence.")
     The government's case against me is both criminal and civil:  an odd conglomeration of vague charges that seem insupportable from my perspective--and shouldn't I know?
     These days I'm spending my time, therefore, writing answers to the complaints, one by one, all 115 of them.  It's boring work, and I'd rather be seeing patients, but this is what I got dished out, for now.
     I remind myself that I am a free person.  Every day I wake up and the sun is shining, the chickens seem happy to see me, the fig trees are loaded with purple figs bursting at the seams, and a family of armadillos has been poking holes in my back yard.  That's all beautiful, right?  (Don't hate armadillos!  They eat cockroaches, and they're the only known predator of fire ants!)
     One of my dear friends has been repeating the same thing to me, a line by Socrates.
     It's better to be the victim of an injustice than to commit one.
     Alas, I am on the better side of justice.  I know that.