Doral Woman Sentenced to 43 Months for Medicare Fraud
| U.S. Attorney’s Office September 28, 2011 |
Wifredo A. Ferrer, United States Attorney for the Southern District of Florida; John V. Gillies, Special Agent in Charge, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Miami Field Office; and Christopher B. Dennis, Special Agent in Charge, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Inspector General (HHS-OIG), announced today’s sentencing of defendant Isachi Gil, of Doral, Florida. At today’s hearing, U.S. District Judge Marcia Cooke sentenced Gil to 43 months in prison, to be followed by three years of supervised release. In addition, Gil was also ordered to perform 300 hours of community service and to pay restitution in the amount of $335,968.
On May 24, 2011, following a three week trial, Gil was convicted of charges of health care fraud and making false statements related to health care matters. According to evidence presented at trial, Gil was a registered nurse employed by 13 separate Miami-Dade home health care agencies. As a registered nurse, Gil purportedly provided skilled nursing services to homebound insulin dependent diabetics who were so ill that they were unable to inject themselves with insulin. Under Medicare regulations, Gil was required to keep records of each time she provided a skilled nursing service to a Medicare beneficiary. Between March 2007 and July 2009, the defendant completed hundreds of documents in which she claimed that she had injected Medicare beneficiaries with insulin two times a day, seven days per week. The trial evidence showed that at least two of the Medicare beneficiaries that the defendant claimed to be injecting with insulin were not even diabetic. In addition, the evidence showed that there were over 150 instances in which the defendant was in Panama, Mexico or the Dominican Republic while she claimed to be providing skilled nursing services to Medicare beneficiaries in Miami-Dade County. In addition, the defendant also signed dozens of documents claiming that she was providing skilled nursing services when, in fact, she was attending classes at Florida International University. As a result of the defendant’s false statements, Medicare was billed for hundreds of thousands of dollars in claims for services that were not medically necessary or actually provided to Medicare beneficiaries.
Ferrer commended the investigative efforts of the FBI and HHS-OIG. This case was prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorneys Daniel Bernstein and Robert Luck.
A copy of this press release may be found on the website of the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida at http://www.usdoj.gov/usao/fls. Related court documents and information may be found on the website of the District Court for the Southern District of Florida at http://www.flsd.uscourts.gov or on http://pacer.flsd.uscourts.gov.
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