Alexandra Gehrke and her husband, Jeffrey King, both of Phoenix, pleaded guilty for causing more than $1.2 billion of false and fraudulent claims to be submitted to Medicare and other health insurance programs for expensive, medically unnecessary wound grafts that were applied to elderly and terminally ill patients. Between November 2022 and May 2024, Gehrke’s companies, Apex Medical LLC and Viking Medical Consultants LLC, contracted with medically untrained “sales representatives” to locate elderly patients, including hospice patients, who had wounds at any stage and order grafts from a specific distributor. Gehrke, through companies she owned and controlled, received over $279 million in illegal kickbacks from the distributor of the grafts in exchange for the orders. Gehrke in turn paid the sales representatives tens of millions of dollars in unlawful kickbacks. She then referred the patients to a company co-owned by King, which contracted with nurse practitioners to apply the grafts. King’s company fraudulently billed Medicare, TRICARE, CHAMPVA, and commercial insurance plans for the grafts. Gehrke and King agreed to pay restitution of $614,990,420 and $605,690,110, respectively, and forfeit over $410 million they obtained from the fraud. The VA OIG, US Health and Human Services OIG, FBI, and Department of Defense OIG Defense Criminal Investigative Service investigated this case.
