A healthcare fraud case involving Medicaid fraud in South Carolina has roped in hundreds of care providers.

According to the report by The Post and Courier, the Department of Justice announced in July that they would file suit and press charges against the healthcare providers. Those involved in the suit and alleged charges include 400 healthcare providers, and of them, 115 doctors.

The report iterates that, according to U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the announcement declared it “a historic day” as it was the largest healthcare fraud prosecution in history.

Jeff Sessions stated, “Too many trusted medical professionals like doctors, nurses, and pharmacists have chosen to violate their oaths and put greed ahead of their patients.”  The report went on, “Amazingly, some have made their practices into multimillion-dollar criminal enterprises.”

In the alleged healthcare fraud, according to the report, the 400 healthcare providers allegedly submitted $1.3 billion in false claims to Medicaid, Tricare, and Medicare.

Numbers provided by the Attorney General’s office in South Carolina states that show that there are allegedly millions of dollars at stake in healthcare fraud cases identified within the last few years. And this has all been occurring in the Palmetto State.

Allegedly, between 2012 and 2016, Attorney General Alan Wilson’s office found and located more than $90 million in healthcare fraud in that state also tied to healthcare providers. In the same time frame, roughly, 2.8 million pertained to possible Medicaid fraud tied to Medicaid recipients.

There is also, purportedly, a vast difference in healthcare provider fraud amounts and Medicaid patient fraud amounts as it is much harder for a patient to defraud the system versus the healthcare providers. Patients, according to the report, may lie about their income on an application. The Medicaid agency may not catch the information during the income verification process, but those cases are relatively rare. The healthcare fraud resulting from patient misinformation is typically discovered within a short amount of time.

However, healthcare providers who can defraud the system may do so by treating numerous patients throughout many years.

According to Nancy Cote, the head of the Medicaid Provider Fraud section in the S.C. Attorney General’s Office, “Provider fraud cases cut across a wide range of behavior over a longer period of time, which explains why the amount of money involved is greater.”

Additionally, for example, according to Cote, she said that a recent case was discovered involving $5 million from Wyeth, a pharmaceutical company. According to the investigators, they iterate that the company purposefully, “concealed, avoided or decreased an obligation” in order to drug rebates on specific drugs to the Medicaid program of the state.