Another insurance fraud arrest on Staten Island

Doctors, longshoremen charged in prescription painkiller bust

Four longshoremen, a laborer, a pharmacist, a chiropractor and a pain management doctor have been arrested and indicted in Staten Island.

“My father worked as a longshoreman, so I grew up knowing the dangers of the job,” Donovan said. “I can’t imagine how those risks are multiplied when people show up to work high on narcotics.”The longshoremen were showing up to work high, according to Staten Island District Attorney Dan Donovan.

The doctor prescribed a mind-blowing 1,775,703 oxycodone pills over four years, Donovan said. Laid out side-by-side, that number of pills would span 7 miles.

Donovan said the case shows the need for a national database to track prescription drugs.

The doctors were also found guilty of insurance fraud.

Chiropractor Thomas Dinardo, 44, and doctor Mihir Bhatt, 47, would schedule unnecessary medical treatments like MRIs and chiropractic treatment and bill insurance companies like Blue Cross Blue Shield and Cigna for services he did not render.

They would direct their patients to fill prescriptions with Rita Patel, 48, at Shayona Pharmacy in New Jersey.

Patel would also overcharge people, turning an extra profit for herself.

Four longshoremen were arrested: Nicholas Tornabene, 28; Rosario Savastano, 28, Christopher Galasso, 29; and Joseph Favuzza, 29.

Laborer Charles Tornabene, 28, was also arrested.

The longshoremen apparently evaded drug tests at work using things like prosthetics and synthetic urine.

Staten Island has been struggling with prescription painkiller abuse for some time now. Last year, New Yorkers died from painkiller overdoses in Staten Island at three times the rate of anywhere else in the city.

“This case is another example of criminals perpetuating and exploiting addiction, at great risk to the public’s safety,” Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said. “It is especially despicable when licensed medical practitioners put profit over others’ welfare.”

Source: Metro.us

Woman's New Antagonism at Work

In a follow-up to the article I posted last week on Women in Wall Street, a human-interest story on shifting gender roles in the workplace, I would like to share some hurdles I observe that still exist for professional women.

As a female lawyer who handles Employment Law cases for accomplished, high profile clients, I have attained an insider’s perspective on woman’s adversity in the bureaucratic domain.  It is a world far different from my own work environment.  There, I may face aggravations that pertain to my cases, but I am in charge.  I maintain control of my space and my schedule, and I ultimately answer to no entity but the court.  Few things, outside of a last minute court order, could make my professional life a living Hell.

 

Unfortunately, this is not so for many of my female clients.  I meet women from all walks of life, especially in the medical field, who have suffered at their job from the refined new face of sexual harassment.  For more than thirty-five years, the law has officially ruled in our favor concerning this issue.  The first official shift came in 1976 as a result of Williams v. Saxbe’s ruling “The humiliation and termination of a female employee by her male supervisor because she rejected his sexual advances, if proven, would be a sex discrimination…”  In 1974, only two years previous, a male boss was within his right to approach and lash out at female subordinates who rejected his advances. 

Blatant sexual favoritism has been outed for the subjugation it is and has for the most part disappeared.  What I find women experiencing now masquerades as an insidious breed of office bullying, one with a consistent origin story and subsequent pattern of systematic destruction shared between its victims.

Women who come to me do so only after a drastic change in their lives: they have often been fired from their jobs, or been forced on temporary disability by a stress-related illness.    In most cases, trouble at work started sometime after an altercation with a male supervisor that resulted from “minor” or “borderline” inappropriate contact.  From this point, the stories I hear bring to mind the fabled jumble of cries ”It’s a bird!”, “It’s a plane!”,  “It’s Superman!”.  Anonymous observers in a crowd all spotting the same aberration, so out of place they are unable to say precisely what they witnessed.  Like these fictitious onlookers, most women suspect they have been the victims of Sexual Harassment, but are unable to say exactly how.

She knows that he yells at her unjustly, but his eyes no longer rove the contours of her uniform.  All she is certain of, women tell me, is that for the past month, five months, two years, her cantankerous shift manager has done everything in his power to damage her reputation and undermine her professional integrity. 

When a man verbally berates and attempts to dominate a female coworker to the point of incurring professional defamation or chronic health decline, it is a form of sexual harassment.  This tactic of harassment subjects women to a “hostile environment,” as defined by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and is a punishable violation of Employment Law.

To create a “hostile environment” cuts to the root cause of sexual aggression, which is not lust but anger and resentment.  Women now experience the secondary effects of their colleagues’ thwarted intimate overtures.  He may never touch her again after the first time, but he will persecute her through insidious means that tear at her sanity piecemeal.  Should a woman become pregnant,  for example, he may force her to work insane hours to prove she is unfit for her position.  His actions can go unchecked for decades because the perpetrator does not believe he is in the wrong.

Thanks to the fundamental progress in our court system, women who are sufficiently observant can take legal action against these men if the facts are in their favor. 

We can punish, but can we prevent abuse of Employment Law? 

I believe the answer is Yes, eventually.  As more people identify patterns of malevolent unprofessionalism and respond to the misconduct accordingly, we will come out of our grey zone, into a more just era.

Estate Planning to Ease Your Mind Over the Holidays

Winter break is less than a week away! Even if you do not celebrate Christmas, like my family and many other New York Jews we know, a festive air is upon us. 

The week between Christmas and New Years is a prime time to vacation.  So, whether you bundle up your whole brood for the ski slopes or jet off to a tropical island with your significant other, be sure to give your family the gifts you most need: financial security in the form of asset protection and estate planning.

When working professionals take a vacation, we want to leave our worries behind.  Yet, as fiscally savvy adults it is challenging not to focus on our finances.  This is especially true for parents of young children; your loved ones need you to make intelligent choices with your money to provide for the whole family.  In order to properly relax over the holidays, we at the Law Office of Inna Fershteyn  suggest you ask yourself the following questions.  You will thank us later lounging on the beach, stress-free, with a cocktail in hand.

All the parents I know think about the welfare of their children constantly, yet a good percentage of couples occasionally choose to leave their children at home when they travel.  This arrangement can be fun for the whole family – parents receive much needed peace of mind and children have the run of the house.  However take a moment to ask yourself: When was the last time you thought about what would happen to your children if anything tragic should befall you?  Do your kids have a legal guardian who can care for them if something happens? Or have you given someone you trust, for instance your parents, the authorization to take your child in for hospital treatment?  You must have a plan of legal recourse in place for your family, for disaster strikes without bias.  Any one of us, myself included, could be one of its victims. 

The untimely death of a family member is a devastating thing to experience.  I wish it upon no one, but we cannot stick our heads in the sand and choose not to think about our death, no matter how young we are or how healthy we feel.  My husband and I started Estate Planning when my children were still in diapers.  We wrote a Living Will that left our twin toddlers what little savings we had and started a Trust for them as soon as we could afford it.  That was over ten years ago, and while we have amended the documents as necessary, we never worry for our kids’ financial futures; they are set for life.

You too can provide for your children in this manner.  I started early because of my profession, but it is always a good time to take control of your family’s finances.  Did you know that if put you assets in a trust before the end of the fiscal year, the money you set aside will not show up on your tax return?  And that you will increase your future eligibility for Medicaid?   It is likely that you qualify for more tax exemptions than you think.   So find out what they are and take advantage!  My associates and I at the Law Office of Inna Fershteyn believe everyone deserves the opportunity to save their family money, so tune in and learn how.

Even Gifted Students Can’t Keep Up In Math and Science, the Best Fend for Themselves

In a post-smokestack age, there is only one way for the United States to avoid a declining standard of living, and that is through innovation. Advancements in science and engineering have extended life, employed millions and accounted for more than half of American economic growth since World War II, but they are slowing. The nation has to enlarge its pool of the best and brightest science and math students and encourage them to pursue careers that will keep the country competitive.

But that isn’t happening. Not only do average American students perform poorly compared with those in other countries, but so do the best students, languishing in the middle of the pack as measured by the two leading tests used in international comparisons.

On the 2012 Program for International Student Assessment test, the most recent, 34 of 65 countries and school systems had a higher percentage of 15-year-olds scoring at the advanced levels in mathematics than the United States did. The Netherlands, Belgium and Switzerland all had at least twice the proportion of mathematically advanced students as the United States, and many Asian countries had far more than that.

Other tests have shown that America’s younger students fare better in global comparisons than its older students do, which suggests a disturbing failure of educators to nurture good students as they progress to higher grades. Over all, the United States is largely holding still while foreign competitors are improving rapidly.

Federal, state and local governments and school districts have put little effort into identifying and developing students of all racial and economic backgrounds, both in terms of intelligence and the sheer grit needed to succeed. There are an estimated three million gifted children in K-12 in the United States, about 6 percent of the student population. Some schools have a challenging curriculum for them, but most do not.

With money tight at all levels of government, schools have focused on the average and below-average students who make up the bulk of their enrollments, not on the smaller number of students at the top. It is vital that students in the middle get increased attention, as the new Common Core standards are designed to do, but when the brightest students are not challenged academically, they lose steam and check out.

Analysts and scholars have studied international trends and identified the familiar ingredients of a high-performing educational system: high standards and expectations; creative and well-designed coursework; enhanced status, development and pay of teachers; and a culture where academic achievement is valued, parents are deeply involved and school leaders insist on excellence.

But raising the performance of the best students will require the country to do far more. Here are a few recommendations:

Government Support

The federal and state governments should support education of the gifted more aggressively. The federal government provides very little money to educate gifted students and state financing is spotty, with many states leaving it to local school districts. The states face a loss of federal funds if students don’t reach minimum proficiency levels, but they are given no such incentive to propel top students to defined standards of excellence. The federal government should require schools to monitor and improve the performance of their gifted students, backed up with financial incentives. Only eight states track the academic performance of gifted students as a separate group.

More money could help create a corps of teachers trained in identifying and teaching highly talented students. Many such students are never identified because of assumptions that overlook minority and low-income students. Currently, only three states require their general education teachers to have some type of training in gifted education and only 17 states require teachers in programs for the gifted and talented to have a credential for gifted education.

Accelerated Learning

Fewer than 45 percent of the nation’s public secondary schools offer Advanced Placement courses, which inject extra rigor and are intended to prepare students for more challenging work in the first year of college. That’s not enough, especially because the courses are increasingly popular when they are offered. At the same time, a disturbing number of the exams taken by A.P. students received failing scores in May — from 38 to 43 percent in biology, physics B, calculus AB, statistics and chemistry — suggesting that too many students are not being prepared adequately and taught well.

In past years, the College Board, which administers the program and the exams, has been justifiably criticized for requiring too much rote learning of a broad range of facts, and too little time for in-depth study, lab work or creative ventures. But now the board is beginning a drastic revision of its courses and exams, which will focus on the most important core concepts of a subject and leave more room for students and teachers to become more creative.

These courses are often missing in rural areas, which lack enough talented students and qualified teachers. It’s a perfect opportunity to take advantage of high-speed Internet service, making use of online materials and video learning to bring expertise to the most distant schoolhouses.

Early College Admission

The ultimate form of radical acceleration is to let extremely gifted students enter college at a young age. The University of Washington has long allowed a select group of seventh and eighth graders, none older than 14, to skip high school entirely and enter a one-year “transition school” in which they live at home to ease the social adjustment while taking courses on campus taught by an experienced faculty. The courses include physics and precalculus along with English, history and ethics. In the following year, transition-school graduates become regular full-time students.

Follow-up surveys have found that these early-entrance students do well academically and socially compared with regular students and with other talented students who have not skipped high school. Most acquire graduate degrees and some found their own start-up companies. A more modest approach used in some communities allows gifted students to take some courses in nearby colleges while still in high school.

In addition, SAT tests that are typically used as college entrance exams could be administered to some students before age 13 to identify who might easily jump ahead to a high school class in a particular subject. A few of these precocious students might be what researchers call the “scary smart,” whose reasoning ability, as measured by math or verbal SAT scores, puts them in the top 1 in 10,000 for their age group.

A pioneering study has followed a cohort of those extremely smart students for 25 years. It found that they have made outstanding contributions to advancing scientific and medical knowledge, earning tenured professorships, developing software, receiving patents, and serving in leadership positions in Fortune 500 companies and in technology, law and medicine. Such students could easily do the academic work in a high school class while remaining with their age peers in other subjects, or could explore real-world learning through internships and apprenticeships, potentially for school credit. The cost would be minimal. No need to hire or train new teachers or write new curriculums. Just add another student to an existing classroom.

Psychological Coaching

Rena Subotnik, director of the Center for Psychology in the Schools and Education at the American Psychological Association, along with several colleagues, has suggested that gifted students receive psychological coaching from well-trained teachers and from mentors outside the school system, to strengthen their ability to handle stress, cope with setbacks and criticism, take risks to achieve a goal, and compete or cooperate with others as needed. Such skills are often as important as brain power to achieve success. She has also proposed that the main goal of gifted education should be to produce not just experts but individuals who will make pathbreaking, field-altering discoveries and products that shake up the status quo.

There is little reliable evidence on the best ways to educate gifted students; much of what exists was produced by programs promoting their own success. Federal agencies should finance careful, unbiased studies of many of the programs in use: specialized schools for science, engineering and math students; courses for gifted students within a regular high school; enrichment programs in the community; after-school mentoring by local scientists; summer programs for high school students at leading universities; and in-depth research projects under the guidance of outstanding high school or professional mentors. There is no shortage of good ideas, but proof that they work — along with the money and will to back them up — remains lacking, a disservice to the students on whom the future depends.

Source NYTimes.com

New York Medicaid Fraud Attorney Inna Fershteyn, interview on RTV

NY City top Medicaid fraud attorney INNA Fershteyn is being interviewed by Russian News channel RTVI on the issue of Medicaid Fraud. If you received a letter from Medicaid Fraud Control unit and are being investigated for Medicaid fraud call 718-333-2394.

http://brooklyntrustandwill.com/
Phone: (718) 333-2394