WHITE PLAINS – A 44-year-old Pelham Manor man pled guilty in federal court in connection with a $50 million healthcare fraud and kickback scheme involving the sale of fraudulent prescriptions for durable medical equipment and other medical supplies to suppliers, pharmacies and laboratories that obtained payment for those prescriptions from Medicare.
It is alleged that between 2019 and 2022, Manishkumar Patel and a co-conspirator fraudulently sold prescriptions and doctors’ orders for durable medical equipment, pharmaceuticals, and laboratory tests to Medicare providers.
Patel had obtained the scripts from call centers that called Medicare beneficiaries and asked them perfunctory questions designed to justify a script that Medicare would reimburse.
Patel turned the information from those calls into scripts by arranging cursory telemedicine appointments with the beneficiaries, a practice called “doctor chasing,” in which the information was sent to a doctor who signed the script without seeing the patients and who was frequently unaware of what they were signing, and obtaining forged scripts.
Patel then sold the scripts to Medicare providers, which filed the orders and billed Medicare.
Patel led the scheme, which resulted in losses to Medicare of nearly $50 million.
Patel pled guilty to conspiracy to commit health care fraud, wire fraud and violating the Anti-Kickback Statute, each of which carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison.
