Faith, Family, Justice, and What I Learned When Our World Fell Apart

If you found this page because you searched my name, you probably saw the headlines first.

Fraud. RICO. Medicaid. Arrest.

You may have seen a government press release or a news article.

What you probably did not see was our family.

You did not see my wife.

You did not see our children.

You did not see the businesses we had spent years building, the people who worked for us, the years of investigation, the documents, the communications, the disagreements over healthcare rules, or what happened to a family when everything it had built was taken away.

A government press release can tell you what someone was accused of.

It cannot tell you what it was like to live through it.

Before any of this happened, we were a family building businesses and raising children.

My wife, Marianna, devoted much of her adult life to dentistry.

Together, we built and operated dental practices.

And yes, they were businesses.

They were supposed to make money.

There is nothing unusual about that. A privately owned dental office is a for-profit business just like thousands of healthcare practices across this country.

You hire people.

You pay rent.

You buy equipment.

You advertise.

You treat patients.

You deal with insurance companies and government programs.

You try to grow.

And, if you are successful, you make a profit.

We believed we were running our dental businesses lawfully. We did not wake up in the morning believing we were stealing from Medicaid. We did not believe we were operating a criminal enterprise. We believed we were doing what we had spent years doing:

One of the things I wish more people understood about our case is how Medicaid dental benefits actually worked from the provider's side.

Medicaid itself did not hand our dental offices a clear, comprehensive set of practical rules explaining how every billing and patient-payment situation was supposed to be handled.

Medicaid funded the program, but much of the administration of the dental benefits was handled through private insurance companies and managed-care plans that contracted with the Medicaid program.

As providers, those were the organizations we dealt with.

Those were the organizations whose provider manuals, contracts, communications and instructions we had to rely upon.

And in our experience, the guidance was poor, incomplete, and sometimes different from one insurance company to another.

Each insurance company had its own rules, manuals and interpretations.

We followed the rules and guidance provided to us by the insurance companies we were contracted with.

That distinction became incredibly important later.

Some of the issues that eventually became part of our case involved whether particular dental materials or services were included in a Medicaid-covered procedure or were non-covered services for which a patient could be responsible.

You would think there would be one clear Medicaid answer.

There wasn't.

We encountered different guidance from different Medicaid dental plans.

So imagine being the dentist or business trying to operate inside that system.

You are told to follow the requirements of the insurance company administering the patient's Medicaid dental benefits.

You follow that company's rules.

Another insurance company may have different rules.

You follow those rules for its patients.

Then years later, the government can look backward at thousands of transactions and apply a different interpretation to decisions that were made based upon the guidance available to the provider at the time.

That is where I believe the system creates an enormous problem for healthcare providers.

If the government is going to place someone's license, livelihood, reputation—and potentially freedom—at risk for violating a rule, then that rule should be clear before the provider is expected to follow it.

A dentist should not have to discover years later, during a government investigation, what the government now says the rule was supposed to mean.

And when different insurance companies administering the same government-funded program provide different instructions, that context should matter.

We believed we were operating our dental businesses lawfully. We followed the rules and guidance provided to us by the insurance companies administering the Medicaid dental benefits.

Years later, the government viewed important parts of what happened differently.

The investigation did not happen overnight.

It went on for years.

There were calls.

Emails.

Meetings.

Requests for information.

Subpoenas.

Patient records.

Staff interviews.

Questions.

More documents.

We cooperated.

At one point, after records from our dental practices had been supplied and reviewed, we received written communication from the Florida Attorney General's Medicaid Fraud Control Unit indicating that the review of our dental practices had been closed because no further action was warranted.

Imagine receiving that letter.

Imagine believing that the government had reviewed your dental practices, examined the records you provided, and concluded that no further action was warranted.

You breathe again.

You believe the matter is over.

You continue working.

You continue raising your children.

You continue running your businesses.

You continue living your life.

I remember thinking about everything that was gone.

The businesses.

The money.

The security.

My reputation.

My home life.

My freedom.

The ability to hug my wife whenever I wanted.

The ability to see my children whenever I wanted.

Everything we had spent our lives building was taken away at once.

But there was one thing nobody could freeze.

Nobody could seize it.

Nobody could take it from me.

And that is when a story I had known my entire life began to mean something very different to me.

Joseph was young when his life was torn apart.

He was sold.

Taken from his family.

Made a servant.

Falsely accused.

Imprisoned.

The Torah tells us Joseph was seventeen when that part of his life began and thirty when he stood before Pharaoh.

Thirteen years.

And then the prisoner became the man Pharaoh placed over Egypt.

I do not compare myself to Joseph.

I am simply a Jewish man trying to learn from the stories and faith that were given to me.

And Joseph taught me something I needed to understand:

A criminal case is a chapter.

It does not have to become an entire life.

There is another story I think about.

King David was pursued by King Saul.

David had opportunities to harm Saul.

In the cave, David came close enough to cut a corner from Saul's robe.

Later, he again had an opportunity to kill him.

He didn't.

David could defend himself.

He could demonstrate what had happened.

But he refused to make revenge the purpose of his life.

That lesson matters to me.

I can disagree.

I can believe my family was treated unfairly.

I can preserve documents.

I can tell my story.

I can challenge things through lawful means.

But if I allow anger and revenge to consume the rest of my life, then I have allowed this experience to take something else from me.

Something even more valuable.

My future.

I do not want revenge.

God is above a prosecutor.

Above a politician.

Above an agency.

Above a judge.

Above me.

He knows what every person did.

He knows what was right and what was wrong.

And He knows what is inside every person's heart.

That belief gives me peace.

If everything our family experienced ends only with anger, then this experience will have taken enough from us already.

I want something useful to come from it.

Somewhere there may be another healthcare provider receiving a subpoena.

Another dentist receiving questions from an investigator.

Another business owner thinking:

"We didn't intentionally do anything wrong. We'll explain it and everything will be fine."

Another husband trying to reassure his wife.

Another parent wondering how to keep the children from being frightened.

If that person ever reads this, I want to tell them:

Take it seriously from the first day.

Get experienced counsel.

Preserve everything.

Get important guidance in writing.

Save emails.

Save payer communications.

Document conflicting answers.

If someone gives you important guidance verbally, follow up in writing.

Understand exactly what the government is asking.

And protect your family.

Because behind every criminal case number is something a docket cannot show.

There is a wife.

A husband.

A mother.

A father.

Children.

Employees.

People who had nothing to do with the decisions being investigated but who live with the consequences anyway.

Our children did not create our legal case.

But they lived through it.

There are moments with them that I lost and will never get back.

That may be one of the hardest things for me to accept.

But it also reminds me what matters now.

I cannot change yesterday.

I can decide what kind of husband and father I will be tomorrow.

If you search my name, you may find one chapter of my life before you find anything else.

I cannot erase history.

I cannot control what every person believes.

And I am not asking anyone to blindly accept my perspective.

I am asking something much simpler:

Look deeper.

Look at an entire human being.

Look at the complete record.

Look at the years before.

Look at what happened afterward.

Look at the documents.

Look at the context.

And then reach your own conclusion.

My name is Simon Leizgold.

My Hebrew name is Shimon Leizgold.

I am a husband.

A father.

A businessman.

And a Jew.

I have experienced success.

I have experienced loss.

I have experienced what it means to lose my freedom.

And I have learned that what happens to you does not have to determine what you become.

I cannot promise you how your story will end.

I learned that businesses can disappear.

Money can disappear.

Reputation can disappear.

Freedom can disappear.

The life you thought was secure can change almost overnight.

But don't surrender the things nobody can take unless you give them away.

Your faith.

Your love for your family.

Your dignity.

Your ability to rebuild.

Your ability to forgive.

Your ability to choose what kind of person you become next.

Fight for yourself lawfully.

Preserve the truth.

Get good advice.

Hold your family close.

And don't allow anger to become your identity.

There are things our family lost that will never come back.

There are years I cannot recover.

There are moments with my wife and children that I cannot recreate.

I wish none of this had happened.

But I still get to decide what I do with the years ahead of me.

I can spend them angry.

Or I can try to make what happened useful.

If telling this story helps one healthcare provider ask better questions, one business owner preserve the right records, one husband protect his family, one father hold onto hope, or one frightened person realize that his worst moment does not have to become his entire identity, then perhaps something meaningful can still come from something that caused our family so much pain.