Medicare fraud: $97 million for mentally ill patients to watch movies, play games
By Eric Boehm | Watchdog.org
While taxpayers were picking up the tab for intensive, outpatient care for mentally ill patients, those patients were playing games and watching movies.
EXPENSIVE GAMES: Patients were supposed to be getting intensive treatments covered by Medicaid at a Houston facility. Instead, they were playing games and watching movies on the taxpayers’ dime.
A federal jury Thursday convicted physicians Mansour Sanjar, 81, and Cyrus Sajadi, 66, the owners of Spectrum Care P.A., along with several of their employees, for their roles in the Medicare scam. From 2006 through 2011, the doctors had been orchestrating a scheme in which they overbilled Medicaid for services that were not performed and, in many cases, which their patients were not eligible to receive.
Spectrum ran a partial hospitalization program for people with severe mental illnesses in need of intensive therapy and ongoing care.
According to the U.S. Justice Department, Sanjar and Sajadi billed Medicare for services when the beneficiaries were actually watching movies, coloring and playing games — activities not covered by Medicare.
An investigation by the FBI and the Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services found that many others patients at the facility were not covered under Medicare for any services.
Sanjar and Sajadi paid kickbacks to employees at other facilities and sometimes directly to patients.
The two physicians and five others convicted will be sentenced in September.
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