Roy operated Selectcare Health Inc.
By Raif Karerat
WASHINGTON, DC: An Indian American man in Illinois has been sentenced to more than six years in prison for his role in a $2.5 million health care fraud scheme.
Ankur Roy, 38, was the owner and operator of Selectcare Health Inc., a provider of outpatient physical and respiratory therapy that had locations in Park Ridge and Skokie, the U.S. attorney’s office said in a statement, according to the Chicago Sun-Times.
He and two other defendants defrauded $2.5 million from Medicare and Blue Cross Blue Shield of Illinois in 2011 by billing for services that they knew were never provided to patients.
Of his accomplices, Dipen Desai was sentenced to 27 months’ imprisonment in December 2014 and Akash Patel is scheduled to be sentenced in July having been charged already.
Roy was allegedly the mastermind of the racket; he proposed the idea to his co-defendants as a means to extricate themselves from debt and then formulated the plan to specifically avoid raising red flags with Medicare and Blue Cross Blue Shield’s fraud detection systems.
“Defendant Roy’s fraud deprived Medicare and Blue Cross Blue Shield of over $2.5 million, a substantial sum of money that should have gone to pay for medical services for senior citizens, and not to line his and his partners’ pockets,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Maureen Merin argued at Roy’s sentencing.
Roy took over $600,000 of the embezzled sum and splurged it for his own purposes, including personal expenses, paying off credit card bills, and repaying his student debt.