Recruiters are trying to enroll Bangor residents in out-of-state addiction treatment by promising free flights and medical detox at luxury treatment centers in California.
Employees of The Rehab Specialist have been spotted in Bangor distributing flyers for their service, shelter and recovery center workers warn. They show photos of a mansion surrounded by palm trees and a pool and advertise a residential program with activities like yoga and equine therapy.
Tyler Poteet, 39, told the Bangor Daily News he was approached by Rehab Specialist employees passing out free coffee in front of the Bangor Public Library last week. One employee, Tucker Tarrant, asked Poteet if he was interested in getting addiction treatment out of state.
Poteet was hesitant at first, but Tarrant said he could get a free flight to California for 90 days of treatment and that MaineCare would pay for it. Tarrant paid for Poteet to stay in a hotel for two nights and bought him dinner. He drove him to Augusta and paid the $40 fee to get a Real ID so Poteet could get on a plane.
“I got really nothing to lose,” Poteet said when asked why he considered leaving Maine for treatment.
Businesses like The Rehab Specialist are part of a lucrative addiction recovery industry that has sprouted in the wake of the opioid epidemic and could be seen as skirting legal and ethical gray areas. Treatment recruiters, known as “patient brokers” or “body brokers,” get paid to entice people to visit particular rehab facilities. In other states, The Rehab Specialist has been accused of insurance fraud and sending people to treatment centers that provide inadequate care, although there’s no evidence that this has occurred in Maine.
Local recovery advocates say this is the first time they’ve seen anyone try to lure Mainers out of state for addiction treatment. Maine has been hit especially hard by the opioid crisis. As a service center city, Bangor has become a flashpoint for the state’s addiction crisis and its intersection with rising unsheltered homelessness and a growing HIV outbreak.
Maine does not have a law banning patient brokering. But the Eliminating Kickbacks in Recovery Act of 2018 made it a federal crime to offer “any remuneration” to a person in exchange for participating in treatment services or in exchange for referring people to services, although there are exceptions.
The Rehab Specialist has been operating in Bangor and Portland on and off for the last couple of months, according to Gus Tarrant, the company’s CEO and Tucker Tarrant’s brother.
The organization says it helps underserved communities by connecting them with out-of-state resources they wouldn’t otherwise know about — a model Tarrant refers to as “direct outreach.” He told the BDN he believes it can be beneficial for people to be treated for addiction away from home and from triggers or risk factors tied to past drug use.
The Rehab Specialist primarily refers people to Gev’s Recovery, a treatment facility in Northridge, California, according to Tarrant. Gev’s is a licensed 12-bed detox facility, according to California state records. Its website does not list any staff names, doctors or otherwise.
A Philadelphia Inquirer investigation found that some Pennsylvanians who were recruited by The Rehab Specialist last year didn’t see doctors or nurses and had minimal medical care as they went through withdrawal at Gev’s Recovery.
Gev’s Recovery did not immediately respond to a BDN request for comment. An employee told the Inquirer the center has medical staff on site and offers medication for withdrawal.
The treatment facility pays for flights, Tarrant said, while his company sometimes helps with food and other basic needs and uses donations to get someone housed between recruitment and treatment.
Tarrant said his company operates legally and ethically. The Rehab Specialist is paid a “flat fee” by the treatment centers it works with regardless of how many patients it recruits, he said.
The Rehab Specialist does not have a website and is not a registered business in Maine. Tarrant told the BDN the company is registered as an LLC in South Carolina under a different name, although he declined to share it, citing privacy concerns.
Gus Tarrant did not respond to texts Tuesday with follow-up questions about his company’s operations in Maine and details about Gev’s Recovery.
Mel Coombs, who runs the Well warming center in Bangor, said he’s never seen a recovery organization operate like this before. “My son’s been in recovery. … I know the intake process,” he said. But this tactic “smells scam all the way,” he added.
The Well has tightened its security protocols and plans to turn away anyone its staff doesn’t recognize who can’t show a photo ID, Coombs said.
He and other service providers in Bangor’s recovery community have been telling their staff and visitors to be on the lookout for recruiters around town.
Joseph Hartel, interim executive director of the Together Place Peer Run Recovery Center on Second Street, said he’s worked in the addiction treatment field and asked around with former colleagues about The Rehab Specialist. “No one knows who these people are,” he said.
Bangor police have received several reports related to rehab recruitment and assigned a detective to investigate, according to Sgt. Jeremy Brock, a spokesperson for the Bangor Police Department.
People subjected to patient brokering in other cities say the process tends to involve luring in vulnerable people with photos of glamorous treatment centers for the chance to make a profit off of participants’ insurance policies, often failing to deliver on the caliber of treatment promised.
“Patient brokering turns vulnerable people into commodities,” said David Eddie, a clinical psychologist and researcher at Massachusetts General Hospital’s Recovery Research Institute and Center for Addiction Medicine.
Scammers operating outside of Maine have taken people’s personal information and signed them up for new private insurance policies to get higher rates, then kicked them out of treatment centers when the insurers identified the overbilling and stopped paying. Such allegations have not been substantiated against The Rehab Specialist.
Although Poteet was told that his MaineCare policy would cover treatment in California, MaineCare regulations indicate that out-of-state providers need prior authorization that is only granted when the patient’s needs can’t be met in state.
Anyone with concerns about out-of-state substance use treatment referrals should contact the Office of the Maine Attorney General, according to Maine’s opioid response director, Gordon Smith. Smith noted that there is high-quality substance use disorder treatment available in Maine.
Coombs said he saw one woman get picked up by a recruiter who showed up at his center last week. The recruiter was passing out Rehab Specialist flyers and a business card with the name Allen that read “elevated recovery through luxury care.” A phone number with a California area code seemed to be blacked out with a marker on the front of the card, and an Oklahoma number was handwritten on the back. The BDN tried calling both numbers; the first was disconnected and the other’s mailbox was full.
This person is not connected to The Rehab Specialist, Tarrant said, and could have found their flyers somewhere they were left behind.
The Rehab Specialist “did not admit any clients” from Bangor so far, according to an employee named Faith who did not provide her last name.
After two nights in a hotel while waiting to get on a plane to California, Poteet changed his mind and decided to opt out of traveling for treatment.
While Poteet emphasized that he didn’t see anything wrong with what The Rehab Specialist was doing, he said, he doesn’t have any money to pay for medical care or a sober living home, and a spot recently opened up for him at the Hope House, one of Bangor’s homeless shelters.
“I’d be doing the same thing there that I’m doing here,” he said.
