Attorneys have filed a class-action lawsuit against the state of Arizona on behalf of an estimated 7,000 victims of Medicaid fraud, which they claim the state enabled.
Starting around 2019, bad actors took advantage of Arizona’s Medicaid agency — the Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System, or AHCCCS — to defraud the state out of an estimated $2.8 billion.
The criminals charged AHCCCS through the American Indian Health Program for addiction treatment services that were never actually provided.
Victims were taken into fake sober living homes and abused. Some say they were starved, others say they were bribed with drugs and alcohol and still others say they were displaced.
According to the attorneys bringing the claim, an estimated 2,000 people died.
“To our knowledge, this is one of the largest, if not the largest, Medicaid scams in American history,” attorney Dane Wood said.
The complaint was filed in Maricopa County Superior Court on Friday.
Native Americans were targeted in the scheme, which lasted for several years.
Wood and his colleagues allege in their claim that the state was aware of the scheme within a year of it starting but did nothing to alter policies and practices to stop the fraud from continuing.
Native American activist Reva Stewart said she wants accountability.
“I have families reaching out to me on a daily basis to tell me that they’ve lost loved ones that were in sober living homes and were affected by it,” she said.
Earlier this year, Wood filed four wrongful-death lawsuits against the state for individual families, but he said that more and more families kept coming to him with their stories — and the attorneys decided they needed to file a class-action suit of a much larger magnitude.
“The further we dug, the more culpable and widespread this entire — I don't even have a word for it - this entire tragedy, it was just so, so big that the humanitarian side was just awful, that we felt we had a duty to file a class action,” attorney John Brewer said.
