The kits of the doctor of the busiest in the country

Photo Rockwall Texas Online
The FBI has, in particular, seized the two vehicles and two small sailing ships in the Dr. Roy during the house searches in 2011.

Éric Thibault

Sunday, 15 October 2017 08:00

UPDATE
Sunday, 15 October 2017 08:00

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“It knocked so loud at the door that I thought the neighbours were in need of our help urgently,” said Dr. Louise Lamarre in recounting how the FBI pulled him out of bed in the June 2, 2011.

• READ ALSO: The descent into hell of a quebec physician
• READ ALSO: relatives see it as a “profound injustice”

When her husband opened the door of their home located on the edge of a lake in Rockwall, Texas, reported Ms. Lamarre, “four or five police officers dressed in black with sub-machine guns of war pointed at us, and returned at the same time”.

“It was frightened, has explained the spouse of Dr. Jacques Roy. We were ordered to sit down and not move. I remained in the dining room, in dust jacket. They have searched everywhere. They kept saying : “You don’t know why we’re here?” It was utter disbelief.”

ILLUSTRATION by Gary Myrick

A portrait of Jacques Roy during one of his court appearances in Texas.

Doctor busy

In 2006, Jacques Roy had reoriented his practice in multiplying the number of home visits to older people, the disabled or the poor.

“Here, most of the doctors are, but only part-time. Jacques loved it. He felt valued and appreciated by his patients. It is as if he had found his vocation. It has unfortunately made it stand out from the lot,” pointed out his wife.

In the area of home care, Dr. Roy has become a doctor busy in Texas, but also across the United States, according to the FBI.

“A doctor can not care for 11,000 patients, it is impossible”, will advocate the attorney for the prosecution, P. J. Meitl, speaking of the customer-the doctor is a native of Quebec would be occupied between 2006 and 2011.

Photo archive

The house that Jacques Roy has inhabited to Rockwall, from 2004 until his arrest in 2012.

Out of the lot

The problem, according to Louise Lamarre, is that there is also in Dallas “a package” of health agencies and private, who play from the elbow to provide to patients all sorts of services at home. To do this, these agencies require the signature of physicians who evaluated these patients in advance and determined their needs.

“These agencies are snapping up the doctors in their [sending] of the patients. There are some who defraud the system. And they have noticed Jacques,” said the wife of Dr. Roy, she is also a doctor in Texas.

Brigade special

Dr. Lamarre said that he counted inside his home, June 2, 2011, 17 officers, and investigators from the FBI and a kind of squad Wolverine specially trained by the u.s. government not to fight against the bikers but to curb fraud in health insurance.

This is without counting those who have invested the premises of the clinic Medistat of Dr. Roy, to DeSoto, where it was employed as Dr. Lamarre, in a medical field is different from that of her husband. This is why she has not been charged in this case.

Photo courtesy

The shelter and The Bridge, in Dallas, where an accomplice of Dr. Roy has tried to recruit homeless people as patients.

Homeless recruited

February 28, 2012, two weeks after he was returned to Quebec for the funeral of his mother, Renée, the FBI had been dreading the Dr Roy at the same time as the ex-director of his clinic, and five owners of agencies of health services who were dealing with him.

The authorities said they had to have charged for fraudulent claims totaling $ 374 million, respectively, for the “visits not required” and “treatment ” unjustified” to 11 000 patients in five years.

One of his accomplices, alleged, Charity Eleda, was even suspected of having recruited patients in a home for the homeless of Dallas by promising free meals to the volunteers.

Another, Wilbert Veasey, Jr., recruiting patients by going door-to-door. A copy of the Bible in his hand, he told them : “God wants you to be healed !”

“The two arms I fell when I learned it, reacted her classmate Marie-Josée Ladora, also doctor. Jacques loves too much his family for having done it. It would never be put at risk. But the perception in the public opinion, is that the FBI don’t stop for nothing. They used him to pass on a message.”

“We want to send a clear message : if you plague the american taxpayer, we will traquerons and we’ll sue you”, warned the deputy attorney general of the State, James Cole, at the press conference held on the day of the arrests.

Photo archive

The FBI and federal prosecutors of the prosecution have delegated several representatives to a press conference to publicly announce the arrest of Dr. Jacques Roy, that they have placed at the top of an organizational chart of the actors in this fraud of $ 374 million $, February 28, 2012.

Screened

“They did move on to a real monster. It is awful.”

Dr. Marie-Josée Ladora, who practice medicine in Gatineau, is very surprised of the tactics of federal prosecutors in Texas, who have portrayed his friend Jacques Roy as a criminal and an incompetent that he had to be away from society forever.

Prosecutors have pointed out that in 1995, in a hospital of Dallas, a girl of 6 years was dead after having been seen in the emergency by the physician born in Quebec. The parents have sued the hospital and received 700 000 $ in a settlement out of court.

“It seemed to be a case of gastroenteritis, reported his wife, Dr. Louise Lamarre. Jacques has rehydrated, stabilized and admitted to the floor, where she was under the care of a paediatrician. Later, it was called James in the disaster, but… She had a endotoxin. The insurers have preferred to settle rather than pay lawyers to defend it until the end.”

Mistress surmédicamentée

Then, in 1999, a woman with whom Dr. Roy had been having an affair extra-marital died in a car accident while she was surmédicamentée to hydrocodone, an opiate that the doctor had prescribed him in secret, without open medical record.

“This is really the only professional misconduct he has committed in his career, has backed his long-time friend Bernard Desgagné. This woman was not her patient and she was a drug addict.”

The license to practice of Dr. Roy was then suspended for 30 days by the College of physicians of Texas.

Hired by correctional services canada for the treatment of prisoners, he was fired six months later for have prescribed Valium to an inmate alcoholic whose withdrawal was difficult.

During the trial of Jacques Roy for fraud, federal prosecutors argued to the jury that the physician had been “humiliated” by these setbacks, professionals and that its reputation was tainted in the health care community in Dallas.

And, according to them, it is at this time that Dr. Roy had the “greed” of using thousands of patients as “pawns” in the fraudulent scheme he had orchestrated, according to court filings.

FRAUD MODE

• Established 10 years ago, the brigade special anti-fraud-type “Medicare” in the United States has up to now apprehended more than 3,500 defendants who have falsely or unfairly charged for more than $ 12.5 billion in health care at the government health insurance plan.
• According to the FBI, it is the type of crime that costs the most expensive in the U.s., causing annual losses exceeding $40 billion.
• In comparison, the largest fraud ever perpetrated at the expense of the Régie de l’assurance maladie du Québec (RAMQ) has been estimated at half a million dollars, in the early 2000s. More than 700 citizens of Lebanon and other countries in the middle East who have never resided in the province were able to receive medical care after having fraudulently obtained their card sun with the help of an immigration consultant in Montreal.