Idaho’s largest hospital system is suing the state’s former prison health contractor for more than $30 million, saying the company fraudulently hid its cash behind a complex restructuring scheme.
The federal lawsuit filed by St. Luke’s earlier this month accuses executives of Corizon Health and its related companies of shirking its duty to repay creditors under a bankruptcy plan.
The hospital said the contractor owes it $31.3 million in underpayments and outstanding claims for providing medical treatment to people incarcerated in Idaho.
A previous bankruptcy settlement designed a 30-month payment plan, which St. Luke’s said the company stopped paying late last year.
Court documents allege Corizon of keeping its debts to St. Luke’s and other creditors in one company and spinning off the rest of its assets and staff into other entities.
In the legal world, it’s known as a Texas Two-Step.
Johnson & Johnson recently tried a similar move to jettison tort claims saying its baby powder causes ovarian cancer. A federal bankruptcy court ultimately blocked that maneuver.
Attorneys for St. Luke’s called Corizon’s move “a sham … used to perpetrate a fraudulent scheme.”
When Corizon restructured the profitable side of its operations into a separate company, its director, Isaac Lefkowitz, renamed the liability-laden Corizon “Tehum” or “abyss” in Hebrew.
Between 2021 and 2022, the lawsuit said Lefkowitz drained about $31 million from Corizon’s bank accounts and transferred the cash to other companies he oversaw.
That included $5.5 million that went to a company connected to Lefkowitz, Geneva Consulting, for a bogus contract where no services were ever provided, according to the lawsuit.
Most of the remaining money, St. Luke’s alleges, went to newly established bank accounts associated with Corizon, but which were inaccessible to the company’s chief financial officer and other executives.
Lefkowitz was only able to accomplish the complex restructuring and subsequent bankruptcy deal, St. Luke’s said, because he forged financial documents to a third-party company that found the scheme to be fair to creditors.
Lefkowitz didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment and hasn’t yet filed a response to the lawsuit.
Editor's note: St. Luke's is a financial supporter of Boise State Public Radio, but had no involvement with the reporting of this story.
Copyright 2026 Boise State Public Radio
