Louisiana Voice

So, why is beleaguered, six-term Jackson Parish Sheriff Andy Brown, along with the number-three man in his office, Donovan Shultz, the sheriff office’s chief investigator, calling on a doctor in Ruston while ostensibly on duty at 11:30 a.m. in an attempt to sell the surgeon on a costly “skin substitute” bandage made of dried placenta that costs patients as much as much as $11,000 PERSQUARE INCH?

I suppose it first must be explained that Donovan and Brown’s son, Andrew Brown, are officers, along with Andy Brown’s wife, Suzanne and Donovan’s wife, Jessica, in a limited liability corporation (LLC) called Six Point Consulting, formerly Six Point Laboratory, LLC, of 101 North 2^nd Street in West Monroe, according to most recent filings on Aug. 11, 2025.

Donovan Shultz and Andrew Brown, along with an individual named Joshua Keller of Smyrna, Georgia, are also officers in Six Point Holdings, LLC, whose address, too, was given as 101 2^nd Street, West Monroe, as recently as Oct. 23 of this year.

The companies are listed in the DATABASE for the National Provider Identifier (NPI), complete with a 10-digit identification number assigned by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to all healthcare providers

The name Six Points, by the way, has its origins from the six points on a sheriff’s badge. Nice that Brown and Donovan would borrow from their profession as law enforcement officers paid by Louisiana taxpayers for the names of their sideline jobs.

(A typical sheriff’s six-point badge)

Another LLC, Shultz & Brown Associates was listed as not in good standing for failure to file and annual report but it, too, included Sheriff Brown and his wife, and both Shultzes as officers. Its address was listed as 856 North Antioch Road in Quitman, which was also the address provided for both Shultzes.

Sheriff Brown, Shultz and one other, unidentified individual, called on a Ruston surgeon on Tuesday to hawk (unsuccessfully, it turned out) the product of a fast-growing but expensive medical procedure used to treat chronic wounds in patients, from burn victims to diabetes sufferers.

Placental-derived scaffolds are composed of extracellular matrix (ECM) that can mimic the native tissue, creating a reparative environment to promote ECM remodeling, cell migration, proliferation, and differentiation, according to a publication by the NATIONAL LIBRARY OF MEDICINE.

It’s a $10 billion a year industry in 2024, a quantum leap from the $256 MILLION IN 2019. With multiple applications of the bandages being necessary to treat some wounds over a period of several seeks, full treatment could cost as much as $40,000 – all paid for by Medicare.

A NEW YORK TIMES article last April addressed doctors’ payments and discounts:

Had the surgeon in Ruston agreed to purchase the skin grafts provided by Brown and Donovan, he could have reaped ast much as 10 percent with the two Jackson Parish lawmen netting about 8 percent – not bad for a moonlight job performed during their sheriffing working hours.

A NEW YORK TIMES article last April addressed doctors’ payments and discounts when reporters Sarah Kliff and Katie Thomas wrote about how some doctors had profited from the procedure:

“Dr. Caroline Fife, a wound care doctor from Texas who often writes about industry excesses, shared on her blog last year an email she received from an undisclosed skin substitute company. The company boasted that other doctors had developed ‘healthy revenue stream’ from its bandages and that a patch smaller than a credit card ‘would generate a little over $20,000 for your practice.’

“Some companies offer doctors a “bulk discount” of up to 45 percent, according to doctor interviews and contracts reviewed by The Times. But doctors then collect a Medicare reimbursement for the full price of the product.

“Anti-kickback laws prohibit doctors from receiving financial rewards from drug companies or medical suppliers. And although Medicare does allow bulk discounts, experts said that the bandage rebates could have violated federal law because they didn’t actually require high-volume purchases. In some Legacy contracts reviewed by The Times, doctors had to buy only three products to qualify for a 40 or 45 percent discount.”

Donald Trump last March 2 was vocal in his criticism of a ruling by the Biden administration which was to have prohibited Medicare from covering the expensive bandages. That prohibition was scheduled to have gone into effect.

Six days earlier, on Feb. 24, perhaps not-so-coincidentally, EXTREMITY CARE, a company that sells the bandages to Medicare, had donated $5 million to MAGA, Inc., Trump’s super PAC. Just as the Biden rule was scheduled to go into effect in February, it was delayed until April 13 as part of a blanket regulatory freeze. Two days before that date, on April 11, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) announced that the rule would be delayed until at least Jan. 1, 2025, thus allowing Extremity Care and other similar companies to continue charging Medicare for the product.

Now, as the new deadline draws nearer, Extremity Care, run by one Oliver Burckhardt, has kicked in another $2.5 million toward the construction of Trump’s White House $300 million ballroom.

So, again, with that deadline looming, along come Brown, Shultz and a third man, trying to cash in on the big bucks. It’s not as if Brown is strapped for cash; he pulls down more than $280,000 per year in salary and benefits and there’s no telling how much he and Donovan pull down from a towing service that Shultz runs (or did run).

So, how did we stumble onto this gem of a story? It’s just a simple case of Sheriff Brown and Donovan refusing to do their job while they pursue their dream of cashing in on the U.S. treasury via Medicare.

It seems that a mother was concerned that her son was the passenger in a vehicle driven in excess of 90 mph by another juvenile and she tried to report the incident to the Jackson Parish Sheriff’s office but met a stone wall of indifference when she mentioned the name of the driver, who just happened (again, coincidentally, I’m sure) to be the son of a school nurse who worked with fellow school nurse, Jessica Shultz, wife of the Jackson Parish deputy sheriff/chief investigator who is a business partner of Sheriff Andy Brown. Ergo, “investigation” stopped dead in its tracks.

And it’s not like Brown doesn’t have any other problems to worry about as he calls on area surgeons in an attempt to broker deals on his placenta bandages.

The state has CANCELED its contract with him to house juvenile offenders after he attempted to use metal shipping containers as jail cells and that juveniles in his care were abused; the shipping containers he intended to use for cells were PURCHASED by the Donovan Shultz’s father; an inspection of his facilities resulted in 83 VIOLATIONS in the treatment of youth in his care and to top it off, one of his deputies, Harry Woolridge, was arrested for the sexual assault of a 14-year-old girl – his own daughter – in 2024.