Benjamin Flaherty, documentaries, film festivals, movies, Nicole Millard, Pat Beall, reviews, Shuffle, SXSW, SXSW Film and TV Festival, Thomas McLellan, true crime
January 29, 2026
by Carla Hay
Directed by Benjamin Flaherty
Culture Representation: The true crime documentary film “Shuffle” features an all-white group of people who are connected in some way to addiction rehab and insurance payouts for this rehab in the United States.
Culture Clash: Several people in the documentary say that drug addiction rehab centers and sober living houses are scams that only care about getting maximum insurance payouts instead of helping people with addiction issues.
Culture Audience: “Shuffle” will appeal primarily to people who are interested in investigative documentaries about widespread fraud.
The investigative documentary “Shuffle” puts a spotlight on rampant fraud in the business of addiction rehab in the U.S., to show how some places go to extremes to get maximum insurance payouts. The movie adeptly balances systemic issues with personal stories. This type of fraud isn’t new, but the documentary makes a convincing case that the problem has gotten worse because of the opioid crisis.
Directed by Benjamin Flaherty, “Shuffle” had its world premiere at the 2025 SXSW Film & TV Festival, where the movie won the grand jury prize for Best Documentary Feature. “Shuffle” gets its title from the shuffling in and out of rehab that many people with addiction problems experience. Addiction recovery is a big and growing business in the United States. At the time that “Shuffle” was released in 2026, addiction recovery in the U.S. was valued as a $42 million business, with treatment for substance/drug addiction at about $2 billion, according to Market Data Forecast.
There are all types of addictions, such as gambling, food, sex, and alcohol/drugs. “Shuffle” focuses on the business of alcohol/drug addiction recovery. “Shuffle” features narration by Flaherty, who says in the beginning of the documentary that he is recovering from alcohol addiction. He decided to get sober in 2018, at the age of 41, after 15 years of being addicted to alcohol, a drug that he said made him feel like he was filling a void inside of himself.
Flaherty says his moment of clarity to get sober happened on July 10, 2018, when he felt his body shutting down. Flaherty remembers that he made a deal with himself that if he was still alive when he woke up, he would go to rehab. Flaherty went to a rehab treatment center in Chicago, and then stayed in a sober living home for one year. He says he had health insurance to pay for all of it.
“It was the transformative experience of my life,” Flaherty says about his recovery treatment. “And then, I heard a story—one that wouldn’t let me go.” The story he heard shocked him and inspired Flaherty to make this documentary, which he filmed over the course of three years.
The story that Flaherty heard was about recruiters (who are often called “patient brokers” or “outreach coordinators”) being paid by rehab centers or sober living homes to convince people to check into rehab centers or sober living homes. These patient brokers target people on social media and often pretend to be addiction counselors or addiction therapists but usually have no qualifications to be licensed addiction counselors or licensed addiction therapists. The patient brokers get paid commissions for every person with health insurance who checked into the rehab center or sober living home. Many of the recruiters are required to fulfill quotas, in order to keep their jobs.
Flaherty found in his investigations that many rehab centers and sober living homes secretly use this tactic and many other tactics (some of them illegal) to get a maximum of profits from insurance company payouts. The documentary also points out that schemes to profit from addiction rehab aren’t just limited to rehab centers and sober living homes but also involve pharmaceutical companies, drug testing labs and government officials who benefit directly or indirectly from these profits.
“Shuffle” skillfully balances looking at “big picture” issues while also presenting perspectives of individuals who are caught in this tangled web of corruption. The documentary follows three people struggling with addiction who have been in and out of rehab several times in their lives. The documentary does not reveal the last names of most of the people in the documentary.
The three rehab veterans who are profiled in the documentary are a man named Cory, a woman named Nicole Millard and a man named Daniel. They were all under the age of 35 when they were filmed for this documentary. And they all have opioid addiction problems. Millard says she had been to 36 treatment centers by the age of 29.
Out of these three people, Cory is the one who has been the most actively involved in participating in rehab schemes, by his own admission. He says in one of the schemes, a rehab center listed him as an employee, with the sole purpose of getting him the health insurance that would pay for his treatment as a patient at the same rehab center. It’s a conflict of interest scheme that Cory says was overlooked for years until the treatment center (which he does not name) was eventually shut down after being busted for insurance fraud.
In the documentary, Cory says he’s only been able to stay sober for a few days at a time. Based on his experiences, Cory says that South Florida (which the documentary calls the “rehab capital of America”) is a hub for a lot of corruption in the addiction rehab business. The documentary shows Cory giving a tour by car to a South Florida neighborhood called Second Court, which he describes as a “drug marketplace” that is located near a drug rehab center.
Cory says it’s very common for people in rehab to get access to the same drugs that landed them in rehab. He shows a cell phone video of himself and other rehab patients being “messed up on drugs” while staying at a rehab center. He also mentions that rehab center employees are often complicit or sometimes supply the drugs themselves.
Millard says that it’s very common for illegal drug dealers to hang out near drug rehab centers where they know they can do business. She remembers staying at a rehab center called Watershed, where she says “drug dealers were circling left and right.” She adds, “I felt like an ant in a sea of humans, with a target on my back.”
Daniel doesn’t have much to say in the documentary except to admit when he relapses. His mother Laura is also interviewed, and she is much more vocal about her frustrations with the addiction rehab system in the United States. She is one of many people in the documentary who think that people with addiction problems are only being used for their health insurance money and aren’t getting adequate treatment at rehab centers and sober living homes.
As for those who need help with addiction recovery and don’t have health insurance, most rehab treatment facilities and sober living homes in the United States typically refuse to give treatment to people who don’t health insurance. It’s in contrast to other nations that have universal health care for all residents. Many of these uninsured people in the U.S. are often the most at risk of dying for not getting the proper medical attention.
Pat Beall, an investigative reporter for the Palm Beach Post, is interviewed in the documentary. She has been reporting on addiction rehab scams for years and says in the documentary that the problems are getting worse. Beall comments, “Nobody regulates sober homes. Nobody cares who’s there, as long as they can have an insurance card and a supply of urine for the owner.”
Urine tests are a standard requirement for any rehab center or sober living home. But that’s a major area that’s being mined for profits gained from corrupt fraud, as reported in the documentary. One of the people interviewed in the documentary is an insurance analyst named Lauren, who has worked for an insurance company that is not named in the documentary. She says a large part her job has been to find fraud that comes from addiction rehab.
According to this insurance analyst, one of the biggest scams is how rehab centers and sober living homes send urine tests to high-priced labs instead of using low-cost urine tests that can be bought at most drugstores. She says that lab tests can cost $2,500 to $5,000 per test. A typical urine test kit bought at a drugstore costs less than $40 and can be as low as $10 in the 2020s, depending on where these test kits are sold.
Lauren also comments that urine tests that cost thousands of dollars per test are “unnecessary” expenses, and drug rehab places often over-test patients, in order to increase the amounts of money than can be billed to insurance companies. “It’s urine fraud,” Lauren says bluntly about drug rehab businesses sending urine tests to high-priced labs. Cory says in the documentary that he’s stayed at many rehab centers where he was given urine tests multiple times a week, when it would only be necessary to get a urine test once a week because the types of drugs they were testing for would be the type that can stay in the body for at least a week.
A man named AJ, who is described as a former outreach coordinator for an unnamed rehab facility, says in the documentary that patient brokers typically get a cut of the insurance money that pays for the patients who were referred to the rehab place by the patient brokers. AJ and other people in the documentary say that although there are some rehab places that genuinely want to help people recover from their addictions, many other rehab places are too caught up in making money off of patients and deviously make no real efforts to treat people with the proper medical care, because relapsing back into addiction is more profitable for the addiction rehab business. Toward the end of the documentary, it’s mentioned that AJ was subpoenaed and had testify to a grand jury about the rehab facility that used to be his employer.
A former patient broker named Jakob says of drug treatment centers’ attitudes about treating patients: “Anything we had suggested clinically was bullshit to them. It was all about: ‘Can we bill for it? How do we bill for it? How much can we get reimbursed for it?'”
Jakob also says that it’s not unusual for addiction rehab places to pay people to enter their treatment program because whatever a patient is paid will be much lower than the larger payments the rehab places can get from a patient’s insurance company. A former outreach coordinator named Laura B., who worked for an unnamed addiction recovery center, echoes the “profits over patients” policy that was dictated to the people who had jobs like hers: “Your salary is based on your quota,” she comments.
“Shuffle” presents a case study of the downfall of Liberty Way, an addiction treatment center in Yardley, Pennsylvania, that was shut down in 2019 because of fraud. Someone who is interviewed in the documentary is a man named Kup, a former Liberty Way executive director, who confirms a lot of the corruption described in the documentary. Among the corruption that Liberty Way was accused of having was allowing drug dealers to do business inside the rehab building. The drug dealers reportedly would drop off purchased illegal drugs at Liberty Way.
The documentary points out that profits from addiction treatment can extend to government officials who create policies that give more leeway to make these types of profits. The documentary names A. Thomas McLellan (more commonly known as Thomas McLellan, who served as deputy director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy from 2009 to 2012. Thomas McLellan is also the founder/chairman of the board of directors at the Treatment Research Institute, a Philadelphia-based non-profit research and development institute.
Thomas McLellan advocated for policy changes that made health insurance companies give wider coverage for addiction treatment. Coincidence or not, Thomas McLellan was also on the board of directors for Invidior, the pharmaceutical company that manufactures Suboxone, a prescribed medication that is popular in rehab centers for treating drug addiction. Thomas McLellan has since resigned from the Invidior board of directors.
The documentary also points out that Thomas McLellan’s son Andrew McLellan was a K1 investor/shareholder of Liberty Way and got a $5.2 million payout when Liberty Way was shut down and sold. Unlike other Liberty Way investors who were convicted of fraud, Andrew McLellan was not charged with any crimes related to Liberty Way. The documentary leaves it up to interpretation over why Andrew McLellan did not face any criminal charges.
Thomas McLellan is shown doing a brief autumn 2025 interview for this documentary. He did the interview by videoconference after “Shuffle” became an award-winning SXSW Film & TV Festival documentary. In the interview, Thomas McLellan compliments director Flaherty for “doing a tremendous service not just for the addiction field but the health care field. I have disagreements with you on certain things, but the main point is the shuffle has to stop.”
It’s unknown if Flaherty had the guts to ask Thomas McLellan about Andrew McLellan’s involvement in the scandal-plagued Liberty Way. You get the feeling that Flaherty never asked about it, and Thomas McLellan probably would’ve declined to comment anyway. It’s interesting that Thomas McLellan made himself available for this interview after this documentary was shown to the public at a major film festival.
Considering the low budget for this documentary, “Shuffle” does a fairly good job of exposing many of the dark secrets of the addiction rehab industry. However, “Shuffle” is a little too narrowly focused when it comes to representation of racial demographics and socioeconomic levels. Addiction is a problem that doesn’t just affect the types of middle-class white people who featured in the documentary.
The documentary could have also done a better job of getting the perspectives of people who own/operate addiction rehab centers or sober living homes. The only “Shuffle” documentary interviewee who fits this description is a sober living home owner named Elijah, and he doesn’t have much to say. Despite these flaws in the documentary, “Shuffle” is worth watching because it serves as a warning about the hidden hazards of addiction recovery at places that aren’t really helping patients but are just using them for big insurance profits.
Abramorama released “Shuffle” in select New York City on January 16, 2026, with an expansion to more U.S. cities in subsequent weeks.