Kansas Company Owner Sentenced to 19 Years in $1B Medicare Fraud; Braces Billed for More Than 346,000 Beneficiaries
JOHNSON COUNTY, Kansas — The U.S. Department of Justice announced on October 15 that Kansas business owner Brett Blackman was sentenced on October 14 to 19 years in prison. Blackman, 43, of Johnson County, Kansas, owned and served as chief executive officer of the health care software company HealthSplash. According to the Justice Department, the internet platform he operated generated false doctors' orders and prescriptions, and the scheme billed Medicare and other federal health care benefit programs more than $1 billion in total, with Medicare and other insurers paying out more than $450 million on those claims.
According to court documents and evidence presented at trial, HealthSplash acquired Power Mobility Doctor Rx, LLC (DMERx) in September 2017. DMERx was an internet-based platform that generated false doctors' orders for durable medical equipment and prescriptions for other items. Blackman and his co-conspirators targeted hundreds of thousands of Medicare beneficiaries across the United States, pressing them to accept medically unnecessary orthotic braces and other items, and then arranged for purported telemedicine doctors to sign bogus orders that co-conspirators used to bill Medicare. The platform connected pharmacies, equipment suppliers and marketers with telemedicine companies that accepted illegal kickbacks and bribes in exchange for signed orders, and Blackman and his co-conspirators took a cut for the referrals. The orders falsely stated that a doctor had examined and treated the beneficiary, when in fact the doctors were paid to sign without any meaningful interaction with the beneficiary, and in some cases with no interaction at all. Testimony from an undercover agent who posed as a Medicare beneficiary showed how the scheme worked: a foreign call center first pushed the agent to agree to multiple braces, and a doctor then signed orders through the DMERx platform, including one claiming that tests which can only be performed in person had been conducted, even though the doctor had never spoken with the agent. Prosecutors said the scheme was concealed through sham contracts and by removing references to telemedicine from the orders to avoid Medicare audits.
In scale, Medicare was billed for orthotic braces for more than 346,000 beneficiaries, an average of about four braces per beneficiary, and more than 1,200 beneficiaries were billed for at least 21 orthotics prescribed through the DMERx platform.
After a 23-day jury trial that ended in April 2026, Blackman was convicted of conspiracy to commit health care fraud and wire fraud, conspiracy to pay and receive kickbacks, and conspiracy to defraud the United States and to make false statements in connection with health care matters. His restitution and forfeiture obligations will be determined by the court at a later date. His co-defendant, Gary Cox, was sentenced in December 2025 to 15 years in prison. The case was investigated by the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General, the FBI, the Department of Veterans Affairs Office of Inspector General and the Defense Criminal Investigative Service, and was prosecuted by Darren C. Halverson and Reginald Cuyler Jr. of the Justice Department's Fraud Division.
(GSM, based on the U.S. Department of Justice release of October 15, 2026)
Published by GSM · USA (original Chinese edition)
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