Once, Derika Moses held records in track and field. She was a force to be reckoned with on the softball diamond. But, as she hoisted a case of soda onto a grocery store display in 2007, everything changed.
Moses carried home a rattling collection of screws and rods that were once embedded in her bone, and didn’t think much more about it until news of The first conviction was the hospital’s erstwhile owner, Michael Drobot of Corona del Mar, who pleaded guilty to conspiracy and paying illegal kickbacks in 2014, admitting he orchestrated a wide-ranging fraud in which “thousands of patients received surgeries at Pacific Hospital not knowing that bribed their physician to perform their surgery at Pacific Hospital,” prosecutors wrote in a sentencing memo.
The screws and rods implanted in their spines via these kickback surgeries weren’t always the real deal And there has been a flood of civil lawsuits against doctors and hospitals in Los Angeles, Riverside and San Bernardino counties — many against hospitals and doctorsAll those lawsuits, however, had to wait until the DOJ’s criminal investigation wrapped up before being heard so as not to compromise the investigation.The Moses case, originally filed in 2014, is considered a “bellwether,” or test trial. Scores of patients with pending suits are anxiously watching its every twist and turn.