The 1,300 community health centers across the U.S. have been hailed as the backbone of the Affordable Care Act’s plan to leave no one without health care. For decades the, federally funded centers have served the poor, the uninsured and the homeless. The Affordable Care Act, commonly called Obamacare, gave the centers an infusion of dollars: $11 billion over five years. That’s a lot of money to accomplish a lot of good. It’s also a lot of money to tempt those with larcenous intent. Two years ago, Alabama Media Group discovered that two community health centers — Birmingham Health Care and Central Alabama Comprehensive Health — had paid more than $2 million for contracts to companies owned by the centers’ CEO. We also reported that the CEO and some other executive employees had formed a company and bought Birmingham Health Care’s main building, then rented it back to the health center. In 2014, we focused on one particular contract to show how the federal grant money intended for the poor was being siphoned off. We reported that the two community health centers had received a combined $660,000 in 2009 to buy emergency disaster kits to be distributed to the poor. A federal report labeled the kits, provided by the private company of the health centers’ CEO, “grossly overpriced.” Even more alarming, the kits were still sitting in a Birmingham warehouse during an April 2011 tornado rampage when they might have been useful. In November and December 2014, a federal grand jury indicted three people connected with Birmingham Health Care. The indictments outline a 97-counts fraud scheme that allegedly diverted $14 million in federal funding to private hands. The CEO has not been charged. But he was implicated in one of the indictments. The grand jury continues to hear evidence.
