Dunellen pharmacy must repay $730G to health insurers [Asbury Park Press, N.J.]

July 30--TRENTON -- A Dunellen pharmacy will serve a year of probation and is ordered to pay $730,000 in restitution for its role in overbilling health insurers by filing claims for brand-name drugs while actually selling generics.

The sentence was handed down Wednesday in U.S. District Court.

The terms of the probationary sentence call for Towne Pharmacy to pay $5,000 a month toward the restitution and to stay offense-free, authorities said.

A guilty plea to scheming to defraud a health care benefit program was entered on behalf of the company in December.

The pharmacy's attorney, Robert Stahl of Westfield, said the 50-year-old business "acknowledged that it should have had better procedures and safeguards in place to guard against individual misconduct."

Authorities said the bogus claims were submitted from 2002 to early 2007 at the privately owned pharmacy, which benefited from the scheme.

A Montgomery man who worked as the managing pharmacist at the drug store was sentenced in February to three years probation and ordered to pay the same in restitution, an amount that is essentially shared.

The pharmacist, Ruben Aguilar, 47, pleaded guilty in June 2009 to a single count of conspiracy to commit health care fraud before the case was reviewed by a grand jury.

He admitted that he submitted phony claims for more expensive brand-name drugs after dispensing generic drugs and for drugs he did not dispense at all.

He and others at the pharmacy defrauded health care benefit programs including Medicaid, authorities said. No other individuals were charged.

On Jan. 29, 2007, Aguilar filled a prescription for an undercover investigator posing as a customer with a generic drug, he then billed Medicaid three times the price for a brand-name equivalent, according to a court document.

To see more of the Asbury Park Press or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.app.com/.

Copyright (c) 2010, Asbury Park Press, N.J.

Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.

For more information about the content services offered by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services (MCT), visit www.mctinfoservices.com, e-mail [email protected], or call 866-280-5210 (outside the United States, call +1 312-222-4544)