Loss to insurance programs of more than $2.5 million.
By The American Bazaar Staff
WASHINGTON, DC: Vipinkumar Patel, 30, of Edgewood, Maryland and Jigar Patel, 27, of Columbia, Maryland, have each pleaded guilty to making false statements relating to health care matters in connection with a scheme to defraud Medicaid, Medicare and the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program by submitting false claims for prescription refills.
Vipinkumar Patel pleaded guilty on August 19, and Jigar Patel pleaded guilty today, said a press release issued by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).
“This scheme amounted to nothing more than ongoing theft from the taxpayers of Maryland,†said Attorney General Douglas Gansler, in a statement.
Both Vipinkumar Patel and Jigar Patel, not related to each other, were citizens of, and licensed pharmacists in India, working in the United States under an H1-B visa. They were hired as pharmacy technicians in 2009 and 2010, respectively, by the owner of Pharmacare, LLC, who agreed to sponsor their work permits.
According to their plea agreements, the Patels held the positions of pharmacy technician and lead pharmacy technician, starting at $10/hour and eventually becoming salaried employees, making approximately $1,400 biweekly. In addition, the Patels were provided with housing and transportation, making their total salary and benefits between $70,000 and $120,000. The value of the housing and transportation benefits were not disclosed on the Patels’ income tax returns.
The Patels admitted that they billed insurance programs for prescription refills when the pharmacy customers had not requested the refill. As soon as a prescription was eligible for refill, the Patels would cause a false claim to be electronically submitted to a health care benefit program. These refills were often billed and filled without the customer’s knowledge, said the FBI.
The medications targeted for automatic refills were typically expensive HIV and cancer medications used by very ill customers. The claims for payment were not reversed when the customers did not receive the medications, which the customers had not requested in the first place. The Patels also knew that medications filled but not delivered to the customer—usually because the customer had not requested the refill—were placed back on the shelves at the pharmacy to be re-used to fill other prescriptions.
In August 2013, a federal search warrant was executed at a then vacant home that was used to house Pharmacare employees. Federal agents recovered undelivered medications worth approximately $87,749.48, as well as binders of alphabetically arranged signature logs which purported to confirm the delivery of medication to Pharmacare customers. However, the signature pages were undated and contained only the customer’s name and signature. Many of the undelivered medications found at the home were actually billed and filled by Vipinkumar and Jigar Patel in their capacity as pharmacy technicians.
The Patels did not receive the profits from the fraud scheme directly, but were able to keep their jobs at Pharmacare and lawfully remain in the United States on their H1-B visas. The loss to the health care benefit programs to date is between $2.5 million and $7 million.
The defendants each face a maximum sentence of five years in prison for making a false statement in a health care matter. Sentencing is scheduled for Vipinkumar Patel for January 15, 2015, and for Jigar Patel on December 16, 2014, before U.S. District Judge James K. Bredar.
Also, Reddy Vijay Annappareddy, 46, of Fallston, Maryland, is scheduled to go to trial on November 11, 2014, on charges of health care fraud and aggravated identity theft in connection with the scheme. If convicted, Annappareddy faces a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison for health care fraud and a mandatory minimum of two years in prison, consecutive to any other sentence imposed, for aggravated identity theft, plus a $250,000 fine.
2 Comments
It’s very simple to increase the supply of American-born nurses. Simply double the wage rates for nurses, and prohibit the H1B Visa program.
If a typical wage rate for an American-born nurse now is, let’s say $38,000 per year, then double it to $76,000 per year. You would see a stampede of young American women and men into the nursing profession.
In Economics 101, that is called the Law of Supply and Demand.
But large hospital corporations are extremely profitable and politically powerful. Their biggest expense is labor cost, so they lobby for the H1B Visa program in order to import cheap foreign labor for nursing positions.
It is become clear that H1B visa program has destroyed the American middle class.
It’s really a simple case Economics 101: The Law of Supply and Demand.
CONSIDER AN ANALOGY
Consider an analogy. Consider, for example, what would happen if H1B were applied to plumbers instead of engineers.
Pick any city, let’s say, Denver, Colorado. Now, bring in 100 busloads of freshly graduated Indian or Chinese plumbers (4,000 new plumbers), who want to enter into the plumbing business in Denver, and make a living.
The result? Wage rates for plumbers will become depressed. The existing 960 American plumbers in Denver, once busy every day, and making a good living, will now have much less work, or no work at all. This is called the Law of Supply and Demand.
All the Denver high school kids hear from their fathers and uncles that plumbing is no longer a good way to make a living. The plumber wages are going down, down, down. In droves, they choose some other path in life. Who can compete with impoverished hordes of plumbers from India who will work for any price? India has 1.17 BILLION people, and many of them are coming here, flooding our labor markets.
The H1B visa law was created, written and lobbied for by large American corporations as a means for decreasing their engineering labor costs. Indeed their corporate profits have zoomed up, up, up — while the wage rates paid to their American engineers have gone down, down, down.
If you flood a labor market with more labor, the price/wage rate of labor goes down.
The H1B Visa is destroying the American middle class.