A beachfront resort rising in Santa Ana, Cagayan was bankrolled with $4.6 million in proceeds from one of the largest healthcare fraud schemes federal prosecutors have charged this year, according to a grand jury indictment handed down in Houston against Filipino American nurse practitioner Marizel Yukee.
Yukee, 49, of Las Vegas, Nevada, now faces home detention after pleading not guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud and health care fraud. A grand jury in the Southern District of Texas indicted her on June 18, and she was arrested days later in Houston.
Prosecutors built the case around four wound care clinics Yukee owned and operated across Texas, Nevada, California and Hawaii. Through these clinics, the indictment states, she and unnamed co-conspirators “targeted elderly Medicare beneficiaries, many of whom were terminally ill in hospice care and caused medically unnecessary amniotic wound allografts to be applied to these vulnerable individuals.” An allograft is a tissue transplant in which the donor and recipient are genetically dissimilar.
The clinics billed Medicare and TRICARE more than $906 million for the allografts and related services between October 2023 and April 2026, the indictment says. Federal programs ultimately paid out upward of $297 million. The volume was staggering on a per-patient basis: court documents note that across her four clinics, Yukee “submitted an average of over $1 million in claims per Medicare beneficiary for allografts.”
The indictment lays out a two-directional kickback arrangement. Yukee allegedly paid providers to steer Medicare and TRICARE patients toward her clinics, while separately collecting illegal kickbacks and bribes from allograft distributors in exchange for buying their products and billing the cost to federal programs.
Investigators traced tens of millions of dollars in proceeds to Yukee’s personal spending. Beyond the Cagayan resort, the indictment cites a $594,000 Ferrari 296 GTS, a $158,000 Cadillac Escalade, an $865,000 Bulgari necklace, and a million-dollar home in Hawaii.
To make the billing appear legitimate, prosecutors say, Yukee falsified patient medical records and submitted fraudulent claims that misrepresented what her companies had actually paid to acquire the allografts. The grafts, the charges allege, were applied to wounds that were already healed, to infected wounds, and to wounds that were not responding to the treatment at all.
Mehmet Oz, administrator of the US Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, said his agency worked with the Justice Department to halt what he described as Yukee’s “lavish lifestyle and defrauding of beneficiaries.”
Yukee has been charged but not convicted, and remains presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty.
