UPDATE:
Well Dr. Baber Younas anesthesiologist (self proclaimed pain management specialist) from Frisco Texas was profiled by
Dr. Deaths reporter in Texas Monthly magazine itself !
Link:
After Kimberly Ray’s tragic death, her family found out just how hard it is to hold Texas medical providers to account.
www.texasmonthly.com
“In the past, you would go to a major hospital where you could rely on credentialing,” Dallas malpractice attorney Mike Sawicki said. “Now you really are on a roulette wheel, not knowing what you’re...
www.facebook.com
TLDR: He got away with it eating grapes all the way to the bank.
AI summary
The article highlights the central role of Baber Younas, an anesthesiologist and entrepreneur, within the context of a tragic case exposing systemic flaws in Texas's medical oversight system. Younas owned and operated multiple medical entities, including Integrity Wellness and Mansfield Pain Services, where Kimberly Ray sought treatment. His actions and decisions reveal a combination of business acumen and controversial practices that intensified scrutiny following Kimberly’s tragic case.
### Key Activities and Involvement of Younas:
#### Business Operations
- Younas owned or had stakes in approximately 70 Limited Liability Companies (LLCs), with many serving as interrelated entities connected to his medical ventures. This fragmented structure helped limit legal exposure and complicated efforts to hold larger entities accountable for medical negligence.
- After acquiring Mansfield Pain Services in 2020, Younas successfully revived its financial operations, partly due to his experience in navigating the complexities of medical billing and insurance reimbursement systems.
#### Hiring and Staffing Oversight
- As the owner of Integrity Wellness, Younas was responsible for hiring or contracting key medical staff. For instance, he hired his sister-in-law as the director of nursing despite her lack of relevant experience in surgical centers. Concerns were raised about improper training among staff for critical procedures.
- He also recruited contractors with troubling professional histories, including CRNA Mauro Molina and anesthesiologist Venkateswara Mandava. Despite their lack of disclosure about past professional issues, both were employed under Younas’s oversight. This raised significant concerns about vetting and accountability at the clinic.
#### Financial Practices
- Younas’s facilities were known for extreme charges, including billing Kimberly’s insurer $139,625 for two visits involving injections and routine items like adhesive bandages and antiseptic cleansers, which were priced much higher than market value. Similar complaints of excessive billing, with charges as high as $200,000 for a single procedure, were consistent across Younas’s operations. The surgery center billed her insurance $139,625 for those visits, including $920 for an adhesive bandage and $288 for Hibiclens antiseptic cleanser, which sells for around $10 per 8-ounce bottle on Amazon.
#### Legal Challenges
- Following Kimberly’s death during a rhizotomy procedure at Integrity Wellness, her family faced significant legal hurdles in holding Younas accountable. Younas’s use of layered LLCs limited liability and fragmented accountability, as lawsuits had to target smaller entities rather than his larger network [citation:7][citation:8].
- Attorney Mike Sawicki, who represented Kimberly’s family, argued that Younas’s business model prioritized profit and legal insulation over patient safety.
### Broader Implications
Younas's leadership at Integrity Wellness, marked by questionable staffing and billing practices, coupled with his reliance on LLCs to minimize liability, illustrates systemic weaknesses in Texas's medical oversight framework. His case underscores the challenges posed by fragmented business structures and insufficient regulatory mechanisms in ensuring accountability and patient safety.
Baber Younas used the metaphor of "a bunch of grapes" to describe the structure of his businesses, which consisted of multiple interconnected Limited Liability Companies
(LLCs). He explained that this structure helps to keep the entities “separate from each other for liability” purposes. This legal strategy minimized exposure to lawsuits by ensuring that liability for incidents, like Kimberly’s tragic case, fell on smaller, isolated entities rather than a larger, overarching company. Younas himself acknowledged the effectiveness of this approach, noting that it allowed plaintiffs to sue a smaller company instead of a bigger organization under his control.
