Rehab Mogul in Jail for Life –
March 11, 2018 – Cliff Brodsky, a Los Angeles investor in Bathum’s enterprises who successfully sued him for fraud, said brokers told him Bathum paid them up to $2,000 per patient. “They go to the AA meetings and act like they love you. They suck up to you,” said Brodsky, who saw Community Recovery brokers in action. “They give you a cigarette and take you out to lunch. But they are just hustling you.” … Multiple levels of care in the rehab industry create opportunities for profit. At the more intensive end, detoxification and in-patient treatment often form the first stage of recovery. Patients then can progress to outpatient treatment, which often is coupled with therapeutic residential recovery in what are called sober-living homes. Recovering addicts live in such homes and are supposed to hold one another accountable for sobriety.
In Colorado, much of the industry is unregulated. Colorado does not require a license for sober-living homes or for substance-abuse treatment facilities that don’t bill Medicaid or partner with the criminal justice system or administer replacement drugs like methadone. Those standards leave a big loophole since rehab operators can choose to bill only private insurers or have people dig into their own pockets to pay for care. Colorado officials say they have no idea how many unlicensed rehab facilities exist in Colorado. A lucrative industry is sprouting up in exclusive, wealthy suburban neighborhoods, often without the benefit of any state oversight or inspections.
