Three former employees of CareCube, an upstart chain of New York City doctor’s offices, say that the company lied to insurers and customers in order to charge them unnecessary payments for COVID tests. KevinTDugan reports
Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: Jason Scott Jones/THE CITY It took only a few days before Rachel Ramirez started feeling sick after a nearby co-worker came down with COVID this past fall. Ramirez has lupus, which weakens her immune system, so she sought out a testing site near her Queens apartment that took her insurance.
For the next 16 days, Ramirez’s attempts to get the charge reversed were met with varying levels of resistance and silence, including, she said, a CareCube representative wrongly telling her she won’t get the money back because the CDC doesn’t recommend tests for vaccinated patients. It wasn’t until after she left a bad review online and sent an email threatening to tell the media about the incident that her charge was zeroed out. “I don’t want to pay this money to these folks,” she said.
So when the pandemic struck, businesses such as CareCube found themselves in the middle of an unexpected gold rush: All of a sudden, millions of people needed tests. CareCube got into the business last March and over the next nine months performed more than 72,000 tests, according to the state’s health department.
When it came to COVID testing, CareCube allegedly doubled its profits by taking advantage of loopholes in the law to charge both patients and insurers for the same test, with patients billed after insurers had paid CareCube. The former receptionist said she was required to send photos of patients’ insurance cards via Slack to a team in India that would send back a price to charge the patient.