Most people never see the paperwork behind a knee brace or a back support that shows up on a relative’s doorstep. You trust that somewhere in the chain, a doctor actually looked at a chart and decided it was needed.
That trust is exactly what prosecutors say Brett Blackman exploited on a massive scale. On October 15, 2026, the Department of Justice announced that Blackman, 43, of Johnson County, Kansas, had been sentenced to 19 years in prison. His role: a scheme that billed Medicare and other federal health programs more than $1 billion.
How a telehealth platform became a billing machine
Blackman owned and ran HealthSplash, which in 2017 acquired a telemedicine platform called DMERx. According to the DOJ, that platform was used to generate doctors’ orders for orthotic braces at enormous volume. Physicians were paid to sign off on orders with little or no actual contact with the patients named on them.
Kickbacks allegedly flowed to telemarketing and call center operators who fed patient information into the system. Internal records, prosecutors say, were altered to hide the telemedicine origin of each order from Medicare auditors. A jury convicted Blackman this year, after a 23-day trial, finding him guilty of conspiracy to commit health care fraud, pay and receive kickbacks, and defraud the government.
Over $450 million actually paid out
The billing figure alone does not capture what insurers lost. The DOJ says Medicare and other federal programs actually paid out more than $450 million on the fraudulent claims tied to the operation. A co-defendant, Gary Cox, was separately sentenced to 15 years in prison, in December 2025.
Why this kind of fraud is hard to spot from the outside
Schemes built around durable medical equipment work precisely because nothing about them looks obviously wrong to the person receiving the brace. A phone call, a questionnaire, a package in the mail. None of it necessarily signals that a real clinical decision never happened.
That is also why these cases tend to surface only after federal investigators trace billing patterns across hundreds of thousands of claims, not because any one patient reported a problem.
What this means if you’re managing someone’s care
If you handle medical paperwork for yourself, a parent, or anyone on Medicare, it is worth checking statements for equipment or supplies you don’t recognize. You can request an itemized Medicare summary notice and compare it against what was actually prescribed and delivered.
A call offering free braces, supplies, or equipment with little medical screening is a reasonable moment to pause. Verifying the request through your own doctor, rather than the number on the call, is a simple habit that closes off exactly the gap this case relied on.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Womens Overview editors prior to publication.