Annette Bosworth, MD terminates US Senate committee over 10 years after primary loss, claims 33k debt “has not actually been due.”

Now there’s a name from the past.  Hot off the press this morning is a new campaign filing from the Annette Bosworth for US Senate campaign.

FEC Termination filing for Annette Bosworth MD by Pat Powers on Scribd

Remember Annette Bosworth? She was the US Senate candidate who jumped in the 2014 US Senate contest free-for-all against Mike Rounds, Larry Rhoden, Stace Nelson and latecomer Jason Ravnsborg.. where many of them went on to bigger and better things. For at least a while.   Obviously, Rounds became US Senator, and Larry Rhoden later found himself as our Lt. Governor.

Jason Ravnsborg successfully ran for Attorney General.. until he wasn’t Attorney General. As he became the first elected official impeached and removed from office after a tragic auto accident.

After placing third in the race behind Rounds & Rhoden, State Rep. Stace Nelson managed to move to the State Senate for most of a term until he flamed out and resigned after a lawsuit was brought to challenge whether he could block someone from his facebook page. Since then he was divorced and remarried for the 4th? time, and his name has become a fading footnote in South Dakota politics.

Since then, candidate Annette Bosworth ran into some… legal troubles.

Bosworth fought a long battle to get her medical license back after being convicted of six felony counts of “offering a false or forged instrument for filing with the state” in filing false attributions that she witnessed petition signatures, after overturning perjury convictions for the same things.

And the impact of those felony convictions continue to be problematic, as noted in this 2023 decision:

Petitioner, Annette M. Bosworth, M.D., is a South Dakota physician who was once enrolled in the Medicare program but no longer is.  On May 27, 2015, she was convicted on six felony counts of offering a false or forged instrument for filing with the state.  She did not report those convictions to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS).  Based on her convictions and her failing to report, the Medicare contractor, Noridian Healthcare Solutions, revoked her Medicare enrollment and billing privileges, followed by a three-year reenrollment bar, which expired on March 26, 2019.  She has not reenrolled.

and..

Conclusion

CMS is authorized to include Petitioner Bosworth on the preclusion list, effective January 1, 2019, because, within the preceding ten years, she was convicted of a felony offense that CMS reasonably determined is detrimental to the best interests of the Medicare program.

I have no authority to review CMS’s determination that Petitioner will remain on the Preclusion List for ten years.

Read that here.

Which seems to say she is barred from billing Medicare for a decade, which doesn’t end until 2029! That’s not going to help the bottom line.

But getting back to the filing. The interesting part in the filing is the last page. Since the end of her campaign, Bosworth has been recording this debt to attorney Joel Arends:

But in today’s filing, it’s not there, and the new filing makes this claim to the FEC:

With the campaign claiming that “The amount represented a future stream of monthly retainers for legal fees anticipated for the remainder of the 2013-2014 cycle.”

Well.. not exactly.   While Bosworth has maintained to the FEC that it was for disputed legal services, Arends noted to me today that it was for campaign management, and not in the scope of legal services.  The big thing that’s happened recently is that I’m told that the statute of limitations for bringing a lawsuit for breach of contract has run out.  And obviously Joel had moved on from this long ago.

It’s hard to give the full account of Annette Bosworth’s careening ride through South Dakota politics in a blog post, because it was just so crazy. I didn’t even get into the part where she spoke about living in a van, Mitchell Olson’s lawsuit against the Annette Bosworth Legal fund, etc. As we get to years and close to a decade later in part, it’s hard to remember the constant drama and insanity that surrounded this train wreck of a campaign.

But here we are. The closing of this campaign account marks the closing of the story of Annette Bosworth in South Dakota politics. And it will be left to the historians to remember.