Running Head: DR. QUEZADA CASE 1
Jorge Zamora Quezada was a practicing rheumatology doctor in Texas. He and
his wife, Meisy Angelica Zamora, were accused of health care fraud and money
laundering scheme involving $240M on May 18, 2018 (Christensen, Nedelmen &
Murphy, 2018). Quezada falsely diagnosed many patients on purpose and gave them
unnecessarily expensive treatments in order to bill healthcare benefit programs including
but not limited to, Medicare, Medicaid, Tricare, and other insurance providers. The
money he got from the scam was enough for him to live an “opulent lifestyle”
(Christensen, Nedelmen & Murphy, 2018).
I. Background
Zamora-Quezada (Dr. Quezada) was born in Mexico and moved to the United States in
1984 to complete his internal medicine program at Southwestern Hospital in Dallas, Texas. He
pursued his degree in rheumatology at the New England Medical Center Hospital, and also
received a master’s in public health from Harvard School of Public Health. Dr. Quezada
practiced medicine in Rio Grande Valley, Texas for 20 years and opened three medical clinics
located in San Antonio, Edinburg, and Brownsville (Andrist, 2018). However, instead of helping
and caring for patients, Dr. Quezada defrauded patients and their insurers to make more money.
His wrongful action is an example of health care fraud, which is a type of white-collar crime
involving the submission of false health care records to insurance providers to generate profits.
According to Christesen, Nedelmen & Murphy (2018), Dr. Quezada misdiagnosed many
young, elderly, and even disabled patients with “various degenerative diseases including
rheumatoid arthritis”. He then prescribed toxic medications and performed excessive medical
DR QUEZADA CASE 2
procedures on his patients even though he acknowledged they were extremely harmful to the
patient’s body. All the unnecessary expensive treatment costs were going to be billed to the
government healthcare programs and other private insurance providers for reimbursements. The
Department of Justice announced that in addition to the healthcare fraud, Dr. Quezada was also
accused of committing money laundering. He was found to have multi-shell companies, which
were used to conceal and secretly transfer money to purchase numerous properties in Mexico
(“Zamora Quezada Indictment,” 2018).
Based on the information from The Patient Safety League (2018), the health care scheme
began in 2000 and would not have been successful without help from Dr. Quezada’s co–
conspirators, who were also arrested for being a part of the crime. Meisy Zamora, known as Dr.
Quezada’s spouse, directed other associates to create false medical records of patients. She
