Metro

‘Millionaire’ Medicaid cheats busted

Millionaires on Medicaid!

Manhattan prosecutors today busted 19 people they’re calling money-bag Medicaid cheats — including a dentist who earns six-figures, a guy who owns two waterfront mansions in the Hamptons, and a Long Island mom whose shiny Hummer was parked in her driveway when investigators came knocking.

“This is really rampant,” the head of the DA’s public assistance fraud unit, Marcy Chelmow, said of the growing city problem of people lying to get on the health insurance dole.

“I think this is just the tip of the iceberg.”

Today’s alleged chislers claimed to be poor, even broke — lying on state forms so that taxpayers would foot the bill for health insurance premiums worth tens of thousands a year. Medicaid is meant for people with low incomes and few assets. A single adult, for instance, qualifies by making less than $10,830 a year and owning less than $13,800 in assets.

But take a look at some of these so-called poverty cases:

Artist Steven Colucci, 57, of W. 109th St, is charged with chiseling taxpayers out of $16,112 in Medicaid benefits between 2005 and 2008.

Colucci claimed he only made $5,000 a year. In fact, prosecutors said, he owns two large, waterfront homes on Dune Road in West Hampton, one of which rents out for $65,000 a summer.

Eufrocina Caluag, 57, of Queens, claimed she was unemployed with zero income. In fact, she is a practicing dentist in The Bronx, pulling in about $150,000 a year, prosecutors said. She’s charged with stealing $6,931 in Medicaid benefits between 2007 and 2009.

Brian Bomeisler, 57, of Greene St., is a well-known art instructor who makes big money with corporate seminars and gets up to $1,400 a client — all by teaching how to draw using the right side of one’s brain.

Bomeisler owns two nice apartments — one in Soho and one in the Lower East Side — each worth more than a million. But prosecutors say he claimed an annual family income of only $26,000, entitling him, his wife, and their two daughters to a total $37,553 in stolen Medicaid benefits.

Among the other alleged cheats is Natalya Azarova, 26, who claimed Queens residence so she could collect a total $33,099 in Medicaid in New York City. She actually parks herself — and her Hummer — in Jericho, Long Island.

The 19 busted today — all awaiting arraignment this afternoon in Manhattan Supreme Court — also includes alleged cheats from outside the city limits who so liked the city Medicaid program, they pretended to live here.

They include a pair of New Jersey brothers who used the address of the jewelry store they own in the diamond district, and husband and wife landlords from New Jersey who own and rent out houses in Staten Island and Brooklyn.

“These crimes, individually, are, needless to say, not the crimes of the century,” said Mark Dwyer, Manhattan’s chief assistant DA. “But when you accumulate this, it’s a big drain on the federal, city and state tax bases.”

There are only 16 Medicaid fraud investigators covering a city of some 2 million Medicaid recipients, said Peter Jenik, an executive deputy investigations commissioner for the city Human Resources Administration.

He said his office investigates about 3,000 cases of alleged Medicaid fraud a year, and is currently taking action against “hundreds of people.”