He's been free for nearly two years after posting an astonishing $10 million bond. But most of the patients who ended up at Ed Novak's West Side hospital weren't so fortunate. Poor, elderly and vulnerable, many found themselves driven by ambulance across the city, past countless better hospitals, to Sacred Heart, the maggot-infested, substandard facility where some of them died, federal prosecutors say, the Sun-Times is reporting. Their doctors would never have sent them to Sacred Heart if Novak, who owned the hospital and acted as its CEO, wasn't dishing out illegal kickbacks so that he could reap millions of dollars in Medicare and Medicaid payments, the feds say.
