Patient Dumping by Drug Rehab Scammers in Beachside Cities

Patient dumping in paradise: When the promise of addiction recovery turns out to be a scam

Along the coast of Malibu, gorgeous-yet-effective rehabs, replete with all the comforts and luxuries A-list celebs expect, really do exist. They actually help people, too. But they’re far from the norm, and pictures of those idyllic facilities are being used to lure vulnerable people far from their homes. An investigation by the Wall Street Journal reports on a series of rehabs focusing on scamming insurance plans rather than treating those patients with substance use issues. As a result, dozens of people aching for sobriety now find themselves penniless, homeless, and hundreds, sometimes thousands of miles away from the sanctuary of friends and family.

Penny Lamb and Jeffery Lichtenberg are among them. Both struggling with meth addiction, they accepted an invitation to move 1,500 miles from their home in Oklahoma to a luxury rehab in Southern California. It wouldn’t cost them one cent, according to a man Lichtenberg knew from prison. Everything would be covered – treatment, housing, food – even their flight out. He helped them sign up for a health insurance plan willing to cover everything. Upon arrival, they could see they’d been duped. The facilities looked nothing like the Instagram-ready photos.

Their treatment – in Lamb’s case, for a nonexistent opioid addiction – included video calls, and they were often moved to locations where other addicts readily used illicit drugs. But, unfathomably, the worst was yet to come. Over seven months in California, their insurance benefits had maxed out, with over $500,000 billed to Lamb’s plan alone, according to insurance records. The facility promptly ordered the pair to pack up and move out, a practice so prevalent there’s now a term for it – ”patient dumping” or “curbing.” With no money and nowhere to go, Lichtenberg asked their program manager for advice on what to do. “If you don’t want to live on a park bench, I suggest you get a tent,” he crudely responded. 

Besides experiencing an illegal eviction – California law requires rehabs that fly patients in for treatment to cover their flights home – Lamb and Lichtenberg are victims of fraud, a multimillion-dollar problem in the nation’s rehab industry, the Journal reports, based on lawsuits filed by insurers and former clients, and federal indictments and convictions. 

It’s illegal to pay for patient referrals, but so-called “body brokers” are paid to entice vulnerable patients to sign up for private insurance plans that are lucrative for providers and have few restrictions. They target rural areas with high rates of drug addiction and few rehab options, making their pitch for out-of-state treatment difficult for insurers to refuse. Beyond the human toll, taxpayers also suffer – most plans are purchased via the Affordable Care Act, so patients rarely pay premiums themselves.

California isn’t the only state facing the problem, but due to its size and overburdened system of oversight and regulation, it’s an epicenter of sorts, with unfit facilities able to operate for some time before being caught. The state says its licensing and certification process has improved and plans are underway to conduct investigations faster, and the new laws have imposed fines for licensing violations and for “body brokering.”

But none of that can make up for the human cost borne by defrauded patients. Robert Millspaugh spent months in inadequate facilities, sometimes starving, and was only flown – to Las Vegas, not Arkansas, where he’s from – after he threatened to expose their fraud, he says. “It was just a holding facility for human trafficking. And they was getting paid to do it.” 

Insurance companies attest to their struggles in lawsuits. Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Oklahoma alleged that a handful of California programs fraudulently extracted $36 million in wrongful payments between 2021 and 2024 – some patients claim brokers falsified Oklahoma addresses to get them on the plan, which used to pay well for out-of-state care, but no longer does. And Aetna has accused one operator, Nathan “Pablo” Young of the company 55 Silver, of defrauding it of at least $40 million, calling his network of facilities, under a number of LLCs, “drug dens.” Young denies any wrongdoing, but his company is also facing at least 70 more claims from former clients or their families.

As she publishes a new memoir, education activist Malala Yousafzai reflects on maturing from young idealist into optimistic realist

It’s been more than a decade since Malala Yousafzai, then 15, survived a bullet in the head from the Taliban. She was on a school bus, and was targeted for defending the right of girls like her to be educated. After recovering from the assasination attempt, she made the brave decision to continue her activism. Now 28, she’s still fighting that fight, though admittedly feeling less idealistic about it. In her second memoir, Finding My Way, out on October 21, she recounts her whirlwind late teens and early twenties, and she talked to Sirin Kale for The Guardian about how her worldview has shifted. In adolescence, she believed that speaking truth to power was enough to make the world listen. But “as I was getting older,” she said, “I was realizing that things are not as straightforward. Things are more complex.”

Still quite young, Yousafzai has deftly navigated the pressures of coming of age, including marriage, under a world of microscopes; fighting for girls’ global education while satisfying weighty cultural expectations and financially supporting her parents, siblings, and their extended family in Pakistan. The Guardian notes that Yousafzai was at one point also covering college tuition costs for two family friends, one in the US and the other in Canada.

The understanding she has come to is one she grew through pain. For years, Yousafzai’s memory of her attack had been repressed, but one night indulging in cannabis with friends, something familiar to many an undergraduate, unlocked the attack in all its horror – the gunfire, the blood, the chaos. “I felt like I was reliving all of it,” she says. It made the days that followed hard to endure. Yousafzai told her parents some of what had happened, but says they responded a bit dismissively. It was hard getting them to understand that she – the world’s youngest Nobel laureate, who’d bounced right back into activism shortly after being shot, was, after smoking a bong, falling apart from anxiety. 

She began to struggle with a litany of symptoms: panic attacks, difficulty breathing and sleeping, brain fog, and a constant fear of a loved one dying. To friends, she lied about being fine, but couldn’t just ignore her deteriorating mental health. Therapy helped her understand what was behind how she felt. 

“I survived an attack,” Yousafzai says, “and nothing happened to me, and I laughed it off. I thought nothing could scare me, nothing. My heart was so strong. And then I was scared of small things, and that just broke me. But, you know, in this journey I realized what it means to be actually brave. When you can not only fight the real threats out there, but fight within.”

In her teens, Yousafzai met world leaders from all across the globe, only for them to stop taking her calls just as the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan. “I feel the world has forgotten about the women in Afghanistan,” Yousafzai says, which is the only nation where girls cannot attend high school or college. Madrasas, or schools teaching about Islam, remain their only option, and the madrasas available all teach the Taliban’s extreme interpretation of the faith. “For years, I’d smiled in pictures with these leaders, shaken their hands and stood next to them at podiums – but not one of them picked up the phone, or replied to my messages. To the men who ran the world, I was just a photo op,” she says. Leading women were different. Hillary Clinton and Norway’s Erna Solberg stepped up, among others, Yousafzai says. In some ways, she’s grown more cynical, but she continues to move forward: “I do my work. I know that optimism is the only way you can keep going, because there’s no other option.”

Yousafazai’s work and personal life have been defined by her consideration for others – she says she does “sort of overthink about other people’s feelings sometimes” – but now she’s learning how to better set boundaries.  “I’m working so hard to learn how to say no,” she says, “and to be more direct.”Once Yousafzai’s memoir hits shelves, it’s expected to hit bestseller lists – and also earn her lots of criticism back home in Pakistan. But she’s “not going to get defensive. If anybody has any confusion, they can read my book and decide for themselves.”

Helping released hostages recover from trauma

This week marked the release of all the surviving hostages held from the October 7th attacks. And while there’s relief and joy for reunited families, there’s also a lot of healing to be done. Israeli psychoanalyst Ofrit Shapira-Berman told Katie Couric that the negotiated ceasefire marks the start of healing not just for them, but for hostages who had been released in earlier groups. “All those who came back before had to almost immediately join in the struggle. It was a defense mechanism – they had to pull up immediately – but it also did not allow them to focus on their own bereavement and healing.” Families, finally able to rest, will also need “a lot of holding and containing… because most of them have held up so fiercely until now and so bravely, and they were unable and reluctant to have time for their own pain and trauma, and all of them are traumatized as well.”

In the first instance, she says, released hostages will “be treated by the state for quite a long time. They’ll receive physical care, and their mental health will also be addressed by social workers and psychologists who work for the state.” While individual experiences varied, “what comes through from everyone is the terror they felt, day and night. They knew they could be murdered at any moment. They were told that. Hamas kept telling them that if the IDF got close enough, they would shoot them in the head. Everyone heard that. And of course, the bombing by the IDF was extremely frightening and very difficult to endure.”

This first phase of the peace plan also involved the return of nearly 2,000 Palestinian prisoners, who Couric notes “were reportedly mistreated (and) tortured during the time they were incarcerated.” Shapira-Berman feels sure that the experiences of Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners are “basically very, very similar, if not the same. It’s the same kind of trauma that so many people here have suffered. There is so much pain, so much trauma, and so much agony in this small corner of the world. It’s horrible. Truly horrible.”

–MindSite News Editors

In other news…

Arizona opens applications to ibogaine research grants. Earlier this year, Arizona legislators designated $5 million in research funds for ibogaine studies – the drug, illegal in the U.S., has shown promise in treating substance use disorders, brain injuries, and PTSD. Now, the Phoenix New Times reports, researchers can apply for grants. According to grant criteria, projects supported include those looking into “the safety and efficacy of ibogaine usage by humans” and “randomized controlled clinical trials that study the treatment of neurological diseases.” Organizations affiliated with grant applicants must originate in the state and have a  “proven research and treatment of neurological diseases.” The primary researcher must also live in Arizona. Applications will be accepted through mid-November.

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Some startup founders espouse LSD’s benefits – for business. Most of us are working on a healthier work-life balance, but tech bros are still pushing the two ever-closer through the use of, well, technology. A few talked to the San Francisco Standard about strategies they employ to optimize time and productivity, including one psychoactive outlier – strategically consuming LSD to generate new ideas. “I think acid specifically allows you to have a big, blank canvas,” Zach Dive, 26-year-old cofounder of AI startup Adam. “It’s not like taking mushrooms, which is more emotionally turbulent. Acid allows you to see the bigger picture.”