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Two staged bus accidents were part of a scheme that led to charges of insurance fraud against a former Philadelphia-based chiropractor, Pennsylvania Attorney General Tom Corbett announced yesterday.
Among the charges against Eileen Means, 60, of Churchville, Bucks County, were 15 counts of insurance fraud, five counts of theft by deception, and one of criminal conspiracy.
Dr. Means, who owned and operated a practice called Frankford Therapy in Philadelphia, defrauded two insurance companies by submitting bills for more than $27,000 for treatments to patients supposedly injured in the accidents, according to the Attorney General's Office.
In both collisions, a chartered bus bound for Atlantic City was struck by a car at Berkeley and Morris Streets, resulting in minor cosmetic damage to the bus minutes after leaving Germantown.
A Starr Transit Co. bus was struck on Aug. 31, 2003, a Wertz Bus Co. on April 18, 2004.
After the 2003 accident, 14 claims involving soft-tissue injuries were submitted to two insurance companies, and investigators later charged nine people with insurance fraud.
After the 2004 accident, 29 claims were submitted to Lancer Insurance, even though the bus had only 21 passengers. A dozen people wound up charged last September in connection with that accident.
During the investigation, a witness said Means told him of the first accident before it happened.
Scott Means, Eileen Means' husband in 2004, sold tickets for the second bus trip and helped charter the bus, investigators also discovered.
Eileen Means and a relative of hers were two of three chiropractors who treated more than a dozen people after each of the accidents.
Only Eileen Means was charged in this phase of the ongoing investigation.
Prosecutors said she submitted bills to the insurance companies for more than 50 days of treatments, even though no patient was treated for more than 20 days.
"The treatments that she billed for were not done and, even if they had been done, they would have served no purpose other than to defraud the insurers," Corbett said.
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