Elizabeth Mercedes Hernandez currently held unjustly at FCC Tallahassee. Inmate number 96666-509 Innocent Nurse practitioner and Mother of five, with no prior criminal history, unjustly sentenced to 20 years because of prosecutorial misconduct and a corrupt system you cannot win against.

Elizabeth Hernandez is still fighting a legal battle against unjust persecution. We need reform to protect our medical professionals.  The system must changed to protect those who like Elizabeth Hernandez, unknowingly find themselves caught in the crossfire of greedy companies and their fraudulent schemes. Hello. My name is Elizabeth Hernandez. I have been a Nurse Practitioner since 2011. I studied very hard for my career and after many obstacles obtained my degree and license. I am also a mother of 5 children. I have 4 boys: 18, 15, 13, 6, and I have 1 girl: 4. I am currently imprisoned and have just been sentenced to 20 years in prison for Conspiracy to Commit Health Care Fraud. 
Now to give you a background to this charge I will bring you back to what happened. In 2018, after having had a rough pregnancy in 2017 where I was placed in bedrest, I decided I had to find a different medical career that allowed me more freedom to be with my family. In comes telemedicine. It was new, innovative, and in my mind...the best hidden secret in medical careers. It allowed you the freedom to work from home, you were able to work several companies at the same time, and the income was better than my present employment due to the different companies you were able to bundle together. However, one single company was not enough to substitute a full time employment so I went to a very well known recruitment company that placed me in several assignments at the same time to give me a comparable, if not better, income to be able to stay working from home. In early 2019, I was placed in bedrest for my last pregnancy from the very day I found out I was pregnant. I worked countless hours, everyday, from very early in the morning until very late in the night. I was so busy. I even hired additional help from nurses and medical assistants to help me. Well, as it turns out, the companies that I had been placed with through the well known recruitment company were committing fraud. They made everything look legitimate. As an employee of the recruiting company, you rely on them to do their due diligence especially because they are your ONLY contact with the company. You follow the recruiting company's instructions and you trust that what they tell you is true. The information provided by recruitment agency becomes your full scope of your knowledge, just your job description. I discovered that these companies I was placed with took the orders you produced for your patients and sold them again and again to suppliers in order to maximize their profit,  increasing the amount of fraud. Once I got news that there were suppliers from all over the country using my prescriber number because of the sales and resales of my prescriptions, I notified Medicare and had them place a red flag on my account. The Medicare representative asked me to file a police report, which I did, and I contacted the prescriber number company. I did everything possible to stop the fraud. In the meantime, another recruiter who was also well known reached out to me and told me about another job opportunity. I found it to be a great service to the community as we were helping people with cancer and family history of cancer attain genetic tests that can help them in future treatment and diagnosis of cancer risk. I sent the job description with contract to the Medicare office of inspector general health and human services officer that I had been in contact with who advised me that I was ok to continue, which I did. According to Medicare & the FBI that  company was also doing fraud. Their instructions on what I was supposed to do with these patients did not satisfy the Medicare requirements according to the government.  The government has made it seem that all my reporting of fraud, police reporting, and Medicare red flag placement was all a plot to shield myself and continue do more fraud. They forget to mention that I was employed by recruiters not by the companies and I was moved around by them based on their needs. I did not even know these companies were in trouble until after I had already stopped working for them for sometime. During my trial, the government placed many witnesses, the company owners and some of those that helped me with my patients on the stand to plainly lie. They twisted text messages, cherry picked anything they can to make me look like a bad person, and showed numbers that they knew were false against me. Of course, they also included a direction of "willful blindness" to the jury instruction which basically states even though you did not know...you should have known. This has got to be the most unconstitutional instruction ever. How can anyone say you should have known something that you didn't.  I am lost for words right now, utterly speechless. I am being held responsible for what those committing fraud did and was sentenced to 20 years. Yet, those that actually did the fraud, the leaders, company owners, the ones that billed millions and made millions, the ones that orchestrated this entire scheme at most got 72 months with an average of 50% off their sentencing for standing up at my trial and lying...That is 36 months!! Not only did they lie but the prosecutors lied too. They said I deleted text messages to cover my tracks when I handed them my cell phone at trial and showed them that I had not ever even deleted one message. They said I falsely reported my number as fraud, they said I moved from company to company when they got in trouble to continue doing fraud, and so much more. Now, I also have to take some responsibility for what I did wrong in this case. I was naive to think the recruiters direction was truthful, I was naive to think that I could trust their instructions as they were given to me, I was naive to think that the answers given to me regarding the patient care was accurate and consistent with telemedicine laws.  My biller who incorrectly billed for services for one single day bundling the patient encounters into just one lump some was another thing that was incorrect. She billed for one day service at 45 minutes on the initial patient encounter date when the billing should have been for a total of 45 minutes over different dates which were given to her in a chart log. Regardless, the government claims I billed for a service that never occurred. The service did occur it just occurred differently on different dates. I agreed to rebill those encounters correctly, however, they refused.  The Department of Justice is going after unknowing medical providers claiming that they are the gateway for these fraudsters to commit fraud. They are over-reaching and now prosecuting these innocent medical providers who can be dedicating their time to helping the community instead. If you do not know the company you are working for is committing fraud then how can anyone be held liable and responsible for conspiracy which must show knowingly, willfully, and with intent. Sadly, my trial only showed the government's version of what they think happened. It did not show the truth. I am now sitting here in prison wondering what is next. Something has to be done to give relief to so many other medical providers like myself who are serving time for a crime they did not know was even being committed. Another thing I want to bring to light is that the government has such a high conviction percentage. Do you know why? Well, not only do they offer discounted sentences to those fraudsters convicted of the crime to testify with lies against you, they also basically push you against the wall and tell you the only way you will ever see your family again is to suck it up and admit to guilt or else they will throw the book at you not caring that the truth is that you are innocent.  How fair is that? Well, it is not fair and definitely not ethical. There is so much injustice happening out there with the Department of Justice that it is wrong for us to ignore that they are trying to prosecute those who are not guilty. They are definitely not serving justice, they are only there for a win. They lie, twist the truth, present false documents, and false testimonies of convicted criminals and stop at nothing to secure a win. They do not care who is affected and they most definitely do not care for the truth.