3 doctors to settle kickback allegations
A Westmoreland County doctor and two other doctors from Florida and Indiana have agreed to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to settle civil allegations that they received kickbacks for referrals to a drug testing lab in Greensburg whose former owner is under indictment.
The U.S. Justice Department said Monday that Robert Fetchero, an osteopath in Jeannette, along with Sridhar Pinnamaneni of Windermere,Fla., and Thelma Green-Mack of Zionsville, Ind., agreed to settle claims of improper payments and causing false claims to be submitted to Medicare for drug testing at UniversalOral Fluid Laboratory.
The settlements follow the indictment in February of William J. Hughes, 70, the former owner of the lab, and a Kentucky psychiatrist, Varanese Booker, owner of Children Behavioral Services in Louisville.
Federal prosecutors in Pittsburgh said the lab paid Dr. Booker more than $800,000 in kickbacks for referrals to the lab for testing services paid for by Medicare, Medicaid and private insurance.
Another doctor who had served as the lab’s medical director, John H. Johnson of Hollidaysburg, has pleaded guilty for his role in the same scheme. He was sentenced last year to 84 months in prison.
According to the civil settlements, the lab paid Dr. Fetchero and the other doctors to refer their patients to the lab for drug tests, after which the lab submitted claims to Medicare for the service from 2011 to 2014.
Dr. Fetchero agreed to pay $200,000. Dr. Pinnamaneni will pay $370,000, and Dr. Green-Mack will pay $130,000.
Dr. Fetchero was seeing patients Monday afternoon and was not immediately available.
The Justice Department said the financial arrangement between the doctors and the lab violated the physician self-referral law and the anti-kickback statute.
“The integrity of the relationship between patients and their doctors is sacrosanct,” U.S. Attorney Scott Brady said in a statement announcing the settlement. “A physician’s medical judgment should never be compromised by improper financial incentives.”
The criminal cases against Mr. Hughes and Dr. Booker are pending in U.S. District Court.
Dr. Booker is accused of receiving cash payments and monthly checks from Mr. Hughes in exchange for referring Medicare and Medicaid patients to the lab.
The U.S. attorney’s office said the two also had a deal in which the doctor would refer patients for saliva drug testing and Mr. Hughes would bill insurance for the tests, then pay Dr. Booker the reimbursement amounts for the tests that exceeded anagreed-upon threshold of $150.
Dr. Booker received a total of $843,242 in kickbacks, prosecutors said, while the lab received millions from insurance based on his referrals.