Dr. Richard Davidson, sentenced to 6 years for $20 million health care fraud
A district judge has sentenced Dr. Richard Davidson, 42, of Delray Beach, to six years in federal prison for conspiracy to commit health care fraud. As part of his sentence, the court ordered Davidson to forfeit around $650,000 in funds traceable to the offense or as substitute assets. The court also entered a money judgment of $2.47 million and ordered $10.72 million in restitution.
Davidson lost his medical license due to his conviction. He
pleaded guilty on Sept. 16, 2020.
According to court documents, in 2018, Davidson and his
conspirators established a conglomerate of durable medical equipment supply
companies. During the creation of the companies, they lied to Medicare to
secure billing privileges.
The scheme involved placing the companies in the names of
straw owners. By concealing the companies’ true ownership, the conspirators
secretly gained control of multiple companies. This enabled the conspirators to
submit high volumes of illegal DME claims while attempting to evade law
enforcement scrutiny. In one year, through the conglomerate, Davidson and his
conspirators submitted more than $20 million in illegal DME claims, resulting
in more than $10 million in payments from Medicare and the Civilian Health and
Medical Program of the Department of Veterans Affairs.
To attain such high volumes of claims, the conspirators used
bribes and kickbacks. Specifically, Davidson and his conspirators illegally
purchased thousands of DME claims from so-called “marketers.,” who generated
the claims under the guise of “telemedicine” when no telemedicine had actually
occurred. Instead, the “marketers” had bribed doctors to sign the DME brace
orders that supported the claims. Davidson and his conspirators paid millions
to secure the illegal DME claims for submission to Medicare and CHAMPVA.
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