Kansas CEO Gets 19 Years for $1 Billion Medicare Brace Scheme

Brett Blackman, 43, of Johnson County, Kansas, was sentenced Wednesday to 19 years in prison, the Justice Department said Thursday. Prosecutors said he ran an internet platform that generated false doctors' orders and prescriptions, which his co-conspirators used to bill Medicare and other federal health care programs more than $1 billion.

According to court documents and trial evidence, Blackman owned, controlled and served as CEO of HealthSplash, which acquired Power Mobility Doctor Rx, LLC, known as DMERx, in September 2017. The department said Blackman and his co-conspirators aggressively targeted hundreds of thousands of Medicare beneficiaries across the country to get them to accept medically unnecessary orthotic braces and other items. They connected pharmacies, medical equipment suppliers and marketers with telemedicine companies that accepted illegal kickbacks and bribes in exchange for signed doctors' orders created on the platform.

The orders claimed a doctor had examined and treated the patient, the department said. In fact, doctors were paid to sign without any meaningful contact with the beneficiary, and in some cases no contact at all. An undercover agent posing as a beneficiary showed the scheme in action at trial, starting with a foreign call center that pushed the agent to agree to multiple braces and ending with a doctor signing bogus orders through DMERx.

Prosecutors said Blackman and his partners hid the scheme with sham contracts and by editing orders to avoid Medicare audits, including removing references to telemedicine. Medicare was billed for braces for more than 346,000 beneficiaries, four each on average, and for at least 21 braces apiece for more than 1,200 of them. The department called it one of the largest telemedicine fraud schemes ever dismantled.

Co-defendant Gary Cox was sentenced in December 2025 to 15 years in prison. The department's Health Care Fraud Strike Force Program, nine strike forces operating in federal districts across the country, has charged more than 6,200 defendants who billed federal programs and private insurers more than $45 billion since 2007, the department said.