Nebraska Attorney General’s Office Settles with Omaha-Area Home Health Provider for False Medicaid Claims

Nebraska Attorney General Mike Hilgers announced that his office has settled with ECO Supportive Living, LLC, an Omaha-area provider of home and community-based living services, concerning allegations that one of their contractors caused ECO to submit false claims to Nebraska Medicaid.

The Attorney General’s Medicaid Fraud and Patient Abuse Unit received a referral alleging that a care provider that was contracted to ECO billed Nebraska Medicaid for services the contractors did not render. It was alleged that the contractors, Kathy and Michael Cohen, falsely claimed that they provided 796 hours of services for an ECO client who was living with them when, in fact, the client was at a day services program run by a different organization. The Nebraska Attorney General’s Office alleged that ECO knowingly submitted 173 false claims to Nebraska Medicaid based on the Cohens’ conduct and was paid $28,952.01 for those claims. ECO denied any liability in the matter, per the settlement. The Attorney General and ECO settled the case for $86,506.03, triple the amount that ECO was originally paid by Nebraska Medicaid.        

The matter was investigated by the Medicaid Program Integrity Unit of the Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services and by the Medicaid Fraud and Patient Abuse Unit. Assistant Attorney General Katherine O’Brien handled the matter for the Nebraska Attorney General’s Office.

The Nebraska Medicaid Fraud and Patient Abuse Unit receives 75 percent of its funding from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services under a grant award totaling $1,014,000 for the federal fiscal year (FFY) 2025. The remaining 25 percent, totaling $338,000 for FFY 2025, is funded by the State of Nebraska.