High profile sentence casts spotlight on lab fraud. Surinder Singh Panshi was sentenced to 16 years in prison after pleading guilty to an elaborate Medi-Cal fraud scheme, California Attorney General Bill Lockyer reports. The sentence is the longest for Medi-Cal fraud in state history. According to Lockyer, Panshi orchestrated a scheme under which 15 clinical labs billed Medi-Cal for tests that were never authorized and/or never performed. Panshi and others stole patient information, usurped physicians' identities and even ordered staffers to draw excess blood from patients to flesh out the scheme, prosecutors maintain. Panshi was previously sentenced to 18 years in prison in New Jersey for money laundering. After serving his California sentence, he'll be transported to New Jersey to serve the remainder of his sentence in that state. More than a dozen other individuals have been indicted in the scheme. Four have already been sentenced to prison time, and another five are awaiting sentence. Lesson Learned: Flagrant abuses of government health care programs can turn up the heat on providers across the board, so labs in California should take special pains to ensure that their compliance house is in order.
A high-profile Sept. 8 fraud sentence could rile up fraud enforcers on the topic of clinical laboratory-related abuses of government health care programs.