Medical Clinic Owner and a Physician Sentenced In $2.3 Million Medicare Scheme
Posted: Saturday, March 05, 2011
by Joel Hendon
http://hebronics.org/index.html
The Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) and the Health and Human Resources (HHR) Office of the Inspector General (OIG) investigated and brought to trial, the owner of a Detroit area infusion therapy clinic, along with his wife, a medical doctor for their leading roles in a $2.3 million Medicare fraud scheme. The two were sentenced on March 4, 2011 by U.S. District Court Judge Denise Page Hood.
De Oleo and Genao were convicted after a seven-day trial in August 2010. De Oleo was convicted of one count of conspiracy to commit health care fraud, five counts of health care fraud and two counts of money laundering. Genao was convicted of one count of conspiracy to commit health care fraud, five counts of health care fraud and one count of destruction or alteration of records. (DOJ press release: March 4, 2010)
According to court records of the trial, De Oleo and his wife actually established Xpress Center with the intended purpose of defrauding Medicare. The business advertised as being an infusion and injection therapy clinic. They had moved from Florida to the Detroit area due to increasing scrutiny by law enforcement there.
De Oleo enlisted his wife, Genao, to help falsify medical files at XPC to make it appear that the clinic’s patients actually needed the medications being billed to Medicare. According to the evidence presented at trial, Genao wrote down fictitious symptoms in the patient charts maintained by the clinic in order to justify expensive and exotic medications that the clinic billed to Medicare. (Ibid)
Evidence presented during the seven day trial showed that the clinic had purchased only a small fraction of the amount of medications billed to Medicare as being used on patients. The medications prescribed were not those best for the patient, but rather, the most lucrative to the clinic. Also according to the evidence, Genao would write false symptoms on the patient files in order to show need for certain medications which, in fact were not used or needed.
It was also shown that the clinic’s Medicare patients were not referred to them by their regular care provider, but were actually solicited by offering monetary kickbacks, for those who signed papers indicating they had received the treatments on file.
As the evidence at trial showed, between approximately November 2006 and March 2007, the defendants submitted approximately $2.3 million in claims to Medicare for injection therapy services that were never provided and were not medically necessary. Medicare paid approximately $1.7 million of those claims. (Ibid)
In an entirely different case, Noel Freytes, 36, a money launderer for Dearborn Medical Rehabilitation Center (DMRC), who pleaded guilty in September 2010 to laundering money on behalf of an owner of DMRC, a separate clinic in the Detroit-area. was sentenced by U.S. District Court Judge Denise Page Hood to one year in prison.
Freytes admitted that he deposited checks from a DMRC account that were made out to a company he owned. Freytes withdrew a large percentage of the money in his company’s account and returned most of it to the co-defendant owners and operators of DMRC. Freytes admitted to having laundered or having attempted to launder $519,540 on behalf of the DMRC owners.
The Medicare Fraud Strike Force was formed in 2007 and since that date, they have secured indictments for over 1,000 defendants who all combined have fraudulently billed Medicare for over $2.3 billon.
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Top-level comments on this article: (1 total)Noel is my father....this is so dumb. :/I'm sorry about your father. I just reported what the Department of Justice sent me.
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