Blood Money is the story of how a Silicon Valley CEO became a fraud fighter. It is an insider’s look at the David vs. Goliath struggle between one man seeking to save his company and stop taxpayers from being ripped-off, and healthcare companies engaged in massive fraud. Affecting millions of taxpayers, it is one of the biggest “hidden” stories in the healthcare world — until now.
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Imagine running a superb business operating with the highest integrity — until squeezed out by a pair of companies engaging in one of the greatest predatory pricing schemes in the medical world. What do you do? Such was Chris Riedel’s dilemma, which led him to become one of the top medical fraud fighters in U.S. history, which he chronicles in this riveting true-crime book, Blood Money.
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Chris ran a highly regarded Northern California lab testing company, Hunter Labs, until falling to the nefarious scheme of the “Blood Brothers”, Quest and LabCorp, the world’s top medical test labs. Their scheme, which involved loss-leader pricing to doctors to gain their business, and then overcharging Medicare, Medicaid and Medi-Cal as much as 20 to 40-fold, has cost taxpayers billions of dollars during the past 15 years — and forced higher quality, but smaller labs like Hunter, either to fold or be absorbed by them.
In Blood Money, Riedel exposes the underworld of medical fraud in unsparing terms. He begins with the Blood Brothers’ fraud against taxpayers, which pushed Chris and his attorney partners, Niall McCarthy (son of former Calif. Lieutenant Governor Leo McCarthy) and Justin Berger into action. Chris and his attorneys blew the whistle, and won a landmark $241 million settlement for the State of California taxpayers in a highly publicized 2011 case.
One man's bare knuckle fight to protect taxpayers from medical lab fraud
Jim Root
Co-Founder and CEO Chi Laboratory Systems
In Medieval Times the Chris Riedel I know would have been Sir Lancelot. In today’s world he donned armor to battle billing fraud of multi-billion dollar companies and the resistance of some state justice departments to take action to enforce their laws and regulations.
Richard Jaffe
Renowned Civil Rights attorney and author, Quest for Justice
"Hard-hitting, takes you into the inner workings and twists and turns of negotiating with the DOJ and state governments … and a hugely important story, because it affects all of us who get medical labs. Fascinating. My hat’s off to Chris Riedel for taking up the fight for all of us."
Robert L. Michel
Publisher of The Dark Report
“Probably the single greatest threat for a clinical laboratory or genetic testing company is for a whistleblower to file a qui tam action that brings in federal prosecutors and results in criminal indictments or civil settlements involved tens of millions of dollars. Now Chris Riedel, who has spent the last fifteen years fighting healthcare fraud and has secured $550 million in settlements and judgments so far for taxpayers, uses this book to draw back the curtain on how whistleblower cases start, why some cases succeed and others don’t, and what it is like to work with government prosecutors. His insights and advice are ‘must reading’ for anyone considering initiating a whistleblower case against a lab, as well as for lab owners and healthcare executives to understand what practices must be avoided to escape a crippling whistleblower lawsuit. It is also a good true crime thriller with unexpected twists and turns that will keep readers turning pages until the end of the book.”