A former Georgia insurance commissioner and gubernatorial candidate will stand trial next month on felony charges.
Former insurance commissioner John Oxendine has been accused of healthcare fraud and money laundering, according to a report by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. A federal judge has denied his motion to dismiss the charges. A trial date has been set for April 16.
He was indicted in May of 2022 and pleaded not guilty to counts of conspiracy to commit healthcare fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering.
According to prosecutors, Oxendine helped Jeffrey Gallups, an Alpharetta, Ga., doctor, scam healthcare insurance providers, receiving tens of thousands of dollars in kickbacks for his efforts. The scam was allegedly carried out between 2015 and 2017, and involved fraudulent claims for medically unnecessary genetic and toxicology tests. The testing was carried out by Next Health, a Texas-based lab company.
In June 2022, Gallups was sentenced to three years in prison for instructing doctors who worked at his chain of clinics to require unnecessary tests for patients. Prosecutors said that Gallups had a deal with Next Health to split the proceeds from the tests, AJC reported.
Gallups was also ordered to pay more than $700,000 in restitution and fined $25,000. In a separate civil case, Gallup and his company agreed to pay around $3 million in order to settle a federal whistleblower suit accusing them of scamming government healthcare programs, according to AJC.
In June 2023, Next Health was ordered to pay more than $218 million after being sued for fraud by UnitedHealthcare in a Texas federal court.
Oxendine is accused of acting as a middleman in the scheme. Prosecutors said that Oxendine’s since-closed business, International Medical Research, received the kickbacks that Next Health paid to Gallups. Oxendine allegedly kept more than $40,000 of that money for himself, AJC reported.
This isn’t the first time Oxendine has been in the news for financial shenanigans. In 2015, Georgia’s ethics commission opened an investigation into accusations that the former insurance commissioner mismanaged his gubernatorial campaign’s finances. After the longest-running ethics probe in state history, the commission settled the last of its cases against Oxendine in 2022, for around $128,000.
Oxendine is the second Georgia insurance commissioner to face federal charges since the turn of the decade. In 2021, former insurance commissioner Jim Beck was convicted of embezzling more than $2 million from his former employer, the Georgia Underwriting Association, by creating a network of shell companies, through which his family and friends would invoice the association for work not actually performed.
Beck is currently serving a seven-year prison sentence, according to AJC.
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