Allegiant Experts
Jan 23, 20202 min
There are many ways to bilk our nation’s health insurance programs out of money. All of them are reprehensible. It goes without saying that health care fraud is a crime that has many victims. When medical professionals take advantage of Medicare and Medicaid by submitting phony bills, it robs everyone who has every paid into their plans. Not to mention, many doctors with criminal intentions knowingly hurt their patients in the process.
In last week’s blog, we discussed the recent sentencing of Dr. Jorge Zamora-Quezada. He was found guilty of knowingly falsely diagnosing his patients with rheumatic diseases. Among many other things, his actions were characterized as “heinous”. In this week’s blog, we’ll discuss the actions of Dr. Egisto Salerno. The San Diego-based physician didn’t misdiagnose his patients. He wrote bogus prescriptions for them when they were already dead.
As reported by the Southern District of California branch of the United States Department of Justice, this past Tuesday, Salerno pleaded guilty to opioid distribution. The 75 year-old “illegally distributed 78,544 hydrocodone pills and admitted that his prescriptions for the 10 mg tablets were outside the usual course of his medical practice and were without a legitimate medical purpose.”
In addition, he admitted that many of his bogus
prescriptions were for multiple deceased or incarcerated patients. According to
the DoJ report, Salerno also admitted that an undercover federal agent visited
his clinic on six separate occasions and received six hydrocodone prescriptions
containing his signature.
“In a separate instance, on a date when the
undercover agent did not visit the clinic and the doctor did not see him,
Salerno acknowledged that a prescription was written in the name used by the undercover
agent and that Salerno completed and signed a progress note in the ‘patient’
chart for the purported visit that did not occur,” details the DoJ.
In his plea agreement, he admits that, at his San
Diego-based medical practice, he pre-signed prescriptions and often allowed his
non-physician employees to complete those prescriptions. His signature appeared
on at least five prescriptions there were made out in the names of dead
patients. The patient names were issued and filled more than a year after the
patient died.
According to the DoJ, Salerno’s guilty plea is the
seventh in connection with a pending case based on the investigation of a “pill
mill.” Each defendant is currently awaiting sentencing.
“The plea agreements of the six other defendants
show that paid patient ‘recruiters’ were bringing ‘patients,’ many of whom were
homeless, to Salerno’s office to secure hydrocodone prescriptions,” details the
report, “‘Patients’ turned over their hydrocodone tablets to the recruiters in
exchange for payment and, in some instances, recruiters picked up the tablets
from the pharmacies themselves.”
Eventually, those hydrocodone pills were sold by the
lead recruiter in San Diego. They were later smuggled into Mexico and sold to a
pharmacy there.
Please don’t hesitate to contact Allegiant Experts to find out how our clinical expertise may help your case. Give us a call at 407-217-5831 or email us at info@allegiantexperts.com.
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