Minal Patel To Serve 27 Years In Prison For U.S. Healthcare Fraud
October 5, 2023
Last week a judge in Miami, Florida, ordered Minal Patel to forfeit more than $187 million in fraud proceeds, including more than $30 million from personal and corporate bank accounts. He will also forfeit his 2018 Red Ferrari Spider, which he bought for about $400,000. Earlier in August, a judge sentenced Patel, 44 years old, to serve a 27-year-prison term for the fraud.
“In one of the largest genetic testing fraud cases ever tried to verdict…(the) sentence makes clear that the Department will seek justice for those who put profits above patient care, including owners and executives,” said Acting Assistant Attorney General Nicole M. Argentieri of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, in a statement.
In December 2022, a jury in Florida convicted Patel of one count of conspiracy to commit health care fraud and wire fraud, three counts of health care fraud, one count of conspiracy to defraud the United States and to pay and receive illegal health care kickbacks, four counts of paying illegal health care kickbacks, and one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering.
From July 2016 through August 2019, Atlanta based LabSolutions submitted more than $463 million in claims to Medicare, including for thousands of medically unnecessary genetic tests, of which Medicare paid over $187 million.
Patel owned LabSolutions, a genetic testing laboratory enrolled with Medicare, the healthcare funding scheme mainly for those 65 and older, run by the U.S. government. He “conspired with patient brokers, telemedicine companies, and call centers to target Medicare beneficiaries with telemarketing calls falsely stating that Medicare covered expensive cancer genetic tests,” according to a statement issued by the U.S. Justice Department.
After the Medicare beneficiaries agreed to take a test, Patel paid kickbacks and bribes to patient brokers to obtain signed doctors’ orders authorizing the tests from telemedicine companies. To conceal the kickbacks and bribes, he got the brokers to “sign sham contracts that falsely stated that they were performing legitimate advertising services for LabSolutions.” Patel did this even as he knew “that the brokers were deceptively marketing to Medicare beneficiaries and paying kickbacks and bribes to telemedicine companies for genetic testing prescriptions,” prosecutors said.
Patel also knew that the telemedicine doctors robo-signed prescriptions for expensive genetic testing even though they were not treating the beneficiaries, often did not even speak with them, and made no evaluation of medical necessity.
The case against Patel was brought as part of a federal law enforcement action against fraudulent genetic cancer testing. In 2019, U.S. federal agents raided genetic testing laboratories, and 35 people were criminally charged in four states in a crackdown on genetic testing fraud that officials said caused $2.1 billion in losses to federal healthcare insurance programs, Reuters reported.
Minal Patel’s forfeited Ferrari. Photo: U.S. Department of Justice
Apparently, Patel’s LabSolutions is still in business, according to a website for a laboratory in Atlanta with the name. “Lab Solutions” the site states, “is proud to offer a wide array of testing services that give providers and patients the information they need to make well-informed decisions.” There is no information on the site about who runs the business.
Tests include one for pharmacogenomics which “provides information on a patient's genetic make-up that can be used to determine how a prescribed drug will relate with him or her. This will give the physician valuable insight into the efficacy of the drug but also potential undesired drug reactions.” The lab also offers Covid-19 testing and urinalysis.
A LinkedIn profile for Minal Patel CEO of LabSolutions has a hazy photo. His post says he has nine skills, including Leadership, Lifesciences, Entrepreneurship and Management Consulting, endorsed by 13 people. But there are no details of Patel’s professional and education background.
Patel “is now paying the price for this crime,” said Jeffrey B. Veltri, Special Agent in Charge of the Federal Bureau of Investigations, Miami, in a statement. “Our message to those who commit Medicare fraud and steal from U.S. taxpayers is clear: you will be caught and you will be held accountable.”
Comment
The Minal Patel story would be heartwarming, were it not that even the legislature failed miserably to extract the level of punitive penalties on banking businesses like Wells Fargo for shamelessly committing exactly this kind of fraud, also targeting the weak and helpless, burdening them with ruinous term investments they had no hope of sustaining.
But the victim in this case was Medicare, aka the US government, a terrible sin compared to destroying the lives of millions of poor.
And that crime pales before the opioid crisis, where the healthcare industry itself 'infected' even more millions of people with addiction, a huge joke on Reagan's War on Drugs, because the punishments handed out are hardly even a slap on the wrist, while the crime continues unabated.
We grew up in an era where an American president, a former high ranking general, could and did directly criticise American industry for pandering to and even creating a market for deadly weapons. Not that it had any effect. The same industry today kills tens of thousands of Americans every year in home and school shootings.
The difference is that today, it is Indians (Indian origin Americans) who direct the bulk of these industries in the USA, and we seem to take pride in their 'accomplishments'. Mr Patel is on the fringes, in comparison, and the article implies even he is getting away with it anyhow.
Vickram Crishna, Mumbai, 10.15.2023
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