Miami doctor living luxurious lifestyle gets 5 years in $38 million health care fraud [Miami Herald]

A Miami doctor was sentenced Tuesday to five years in federal prison after admitting he filed around $38 million in fraudulent claims to health insurance companies for prescriptions that patients didn’t need or receive.

Armando Valdes was also ordered to forfeit nearly $8 million and four real estate properties, including a beachfront condominium unit in Pompano Beach worth over $1 million, a 2,244 sqft house in Estero and a smaller condo in Aventura, court records show. The 63-year-old man also had to give away a 2018 Cadillac Escalade and a 2016 Tesla Model S.

From 2015 through 2021, Valdes owned and operated Gasiel Medical Services, Corp., a medical clinic in Miami, from where he submitted around $38 million in fraudulent claims to United Healthcare and Blue Cross Blue Shield for the prescription drug Infliximab, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Miami said Wednesday in a news release.

South Florida still No 1 in healthcare fraud. Ripoffs cost Medicare billions a year

Also known by the brand name Remicade, Infliximab is an expensive prescription approved for the treatment of Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis, rheumatoid and psoriatic arthritis, among other conditions. Infliximab, the attorney’s office said, is one of the most expensive prescription drugs on the market — a single dose can have a retail price of nearly $10,000.

READ MORE: Miami-Dade man collected millions from insurers for bogus bills, feds say. Now he’s locked up.

Prosecutors say that despite claiming approximately $38 million in reimbursements for Infliximab purportedly provided to patients, Valdes admitted as part of his guilty plea in May that he never provided even a single infusion of the drug and that his patients didn’t require the medication.

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