Allstate Insurance Company has filed a lawsuit against 10 defendants in the New York area in order to help to recover $5 million in fraudulent insurance claims.
This is the company’s fourth lawsuit of this nature this year. The complaint includes specific mention of five medical professional corporations, a physician, one corporation, and three individuals who are not physicians.
Thirty one fraud lawsuits worth over $170 million in damages have been filed by Allstate in the state of New York since 2003.
New York state is a hotbed of insurance fraud at the moment, according to the Insurance Information Institute, which also said that no-fault fraud is leading to hundreds of millions of dollars in additional costs to New Yorkers every year.
Spokesperson Krista Conte from the New York office for Allstate, said that honest New Yorkers are paying a kind of “fraud tax” as a result of the insurance fraud crisis in that state. She added that “We need lawmakers to enact meaningful insurance reform that puts the citizens of New York first.”
The lawsuit claims that five professional medical corporations in New York – Quality Medical Healthcare Provider P.C., Accurate Medical, P.C., J.P. Medical, P.C, CAN Medical, P.C., and Nolia Medical, P.C. – were incorporated fraudulently by way of a strategy that utilized licensed medical physician’s names, but that a non-physician owner was secretly controlling the operations of these businesses.
The complaint made by Allstate goes on to say that Uptown Health Care Management, Inc., a corporation, had formed a Bronx-based surgery center and a Manhattan-based medical clinic; both of which were sending fraudulent bills to the insurer.