When economic times get tough there’s always someone out there to take advantage and in this case fraud was taking place when patients would fill their prescriptions and sell them to a local drug dealer who was reselling their prescriptions on the street. Medicaid pays and the crooks get the resell in this case in New York which was broken up by the DEA. 
Patients in their 50-60s were providing the drugs and the dealer was paying them for what Medicaid paid for, oxycodone and hydrocodone. A 90-count bottle of pills where he paid around$1,000 or less for was worth $7,200 on the street. If one was paying retail on the street, that’s a lot of money and quite a racket they had going. In one case the doctor requested a urine test from the patient and the crook even brought that over! BD
BUFFALO, N.Y. – Ethel Johnson couldn't get her prescription for pain medication filled fast enough. The 60-year-old Buffalo woman was hurting — but investigators say that wasn't the reason for the rush.
According to secretly recorded telephone conversations, the sooner Johnson could pick up her pills, the more quickly she could sell them to her dealer. Her pain pills were destined for the street.
Johnson is among 33 people charged so far in a large-scale investigation that has opened a window into an emerging class of suppliers in the illicit drug trade: medical patients, including many who rely on the publicly funded Medicaid program to pay for their appointments and prescriptions. She has pleaded not guilty.
Often at no charge, the patients see a doctor, or several doctors, and come away with prescriptions for narcotic OxyContin and other pills they then sell to a dealer for as much as $1,000. If they are on Medicaid, the program is billed about $1,060 for a typical 60-pill, 80-mg prescription, along with the $23-to-$39 cost of the doctor's visit.
NY bust: Medicaid patients' Rx drugs go to dealers - Yahoo! News
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