The facts
Brett Blackman, 43, of Johnson County, Kansas, owned and ran HealthSplash, a health care software company, as its CEO. He was sentenced to 19 years in prison for operating a platform that generated false doctors' orders and prescriptions to defraud Medicare and other federal health care benefit programs out of more than $1 billion.
Blackman acquired Power Mobility Doctor Rx, LLC (DMERx) in Sept. 2017. DMERx was an internet-based platform that generated false and fraudulent doctors' orders for durable medical equipment and other items. Blackman and his co-conspirators hooked up pharmacies, medical equipment suppliers, and marketers with telemedicine companies that would take illegal kickbacks and bribes in exchange for signed doctors' orders made on the DMERx platform. Blackman and his crew took a cut of the referrals.
He and his co-conspirators aggressively targeted hundreds of thousands of Medicare beneficiaries to get them to accept medically unnecessary orthotic braces and other items, then got purported telemedicine doctors to sign bogus prescription orders so the crew could bill Medicare. The orders falsely said a doctor had examined and treated the beneficiaries, when in reality the doctors were just paid to sign, with no meaningful interaction with the beneficiary, and in some cases no interaction at all. An undercover agent posing as a Medicare beneficiary was pushed by a foreign call center to agree to multiple braces, and a doctor then signed bogus orders for them on Blackman's platform. One order claimed the doctor had run tests that can only be performed in person, even though the doctor never spoke with the undercover "patient."
The suppliers and pharmacies paying the kickbacks billed Medicare and other insurers more than $1 billion. Medicare and the insurers paid out more than $450 million. Blackman and his co-conspirators hid the scheme with sham contracts and by doctoring the orders to dodge Medicare audits, including by scrubbing references to telemedicine out of the doctors' orders.
The numbers: Medicare was fraudulently billed for orthotic braces for more than 346,000 beneficiaries. On average, four braces per beneficiary. More than 1,200 beneficiaries were billed for at least 21 orthotics each through Blackman's DMERx platform.
After a 23-day jury trial ending in Apr. 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 will be decided later. His co-defendant, Gary Cox, got 15 years in prison in Dec. 2025. The case was investigated by HHS-OIG, the FBI, VA-OIG, and DCIS.
Our take
Brett Blackman looked at the Medicare trust fund and saw a piñata shaped like your grandfather's knee. His company didn't sell health care. It sold invoices. A foreign call center rang up old people, talked them into braces they didn't need, and then a doctor Blackman had on the payroll signed the order without ever speaking to the so-called patient, without examining anything, in some cases without even the pretense of a hello. That is not medicine. That is a signature mill with a stethoscope drawn on the box.
The detail that gives the whole game away is the cover-up. When Blackman's crew worried about Medicare audits, they didn't stop the fraud. They deleted the word telemedicine from the doctors' orders. That was the plan. Find-and-replace as a business strategy. These motherfuckers billed a billion dollars off equipment nobody needed and their big-brain compliance program was the delete key.
And then there are the numbers, which read like a parody of American health care. Four braces per person, on average, across 346,000 people. More than 1,200 people were billed for at least 21 orthotics each. Twenty-one braces. At that point you are not treating a patient, you are building a suit of armor out of one. Some poor bastard in Johnson County's ledger is walking around as a fully articulated action figure and Blackman's crew pocketed the cut.
The DOJ calls it one of the largest telemedicine fraud schemes ever, which is saying something, because stealing from Medicare is basically a national sport with better uniforms. Blackman got 19 years. His partner in crime Gary Cox got 15. The only honest thing in the entire operation was the sentencing: a brace, finally, that Blackman actually gets to keep wearing.
