Dosed in juvie jail: Troubled doctors hired to treat kids in state custody
–Excerpt
By the time Florida started paying Dr. Gold Smith Dorval to counsel and medicate jailed children, the Pembroke Pines psychiatrist already had experience with kids in state custody.
He had used them, authorities said, to bilk the government out of money for the poor.
When Dorval pleaded no contest to a felony grand theft charge, it should have barred him, by law, from working for Florida’s Department of Juvenile Justice.
It didn’t.
And, like Dorval, other doctors have emerged from past troubles and gotten jobs at DJJ — with authority to prescribe drugs to kids in state jails, a Palm Beach Post investigation has found…
In the late 1990s, Dorval claimed he was providing juvenile delinquents and other vulnerable children with needed therapy. Instead, state investigators said, he used bogus counselors to bill Medicaid for more than $350,000 in fraudulent claims.
He charged the government for offering more than 24 hours’ worth of children’s therapy in a single day, investigators said, and structured the scheme around kids who were homeless or in DJJ custody or foster care.
He tended to bill “for those children that the system ‘lost,’ ” according to an affidavit for his arrest.
Originally charged with four felonies in Broward, Dorval pleaded no contest to one count of grand theft in 2004.
Later, to keep his medical license, he agreed to pay $10,000 and was suspended, reprimanded and put on four years’ probation…
Excerpted from:Dosed in juvie jail: Troubled doctors hired to treat kids in state custody
By Michael LaForgiaco
Palm Beach Post
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