Orange County Pharmacist Found Guilty of 22 Felonies for Her Role in $11 Million Scheme to Defraud the U.S. Military's Health Care Plan
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Orange County Pharmacist Found Guilty of 22 Felonies for Her Role in
Compounded drugs are tailor-made products doctors may prescribe when the
According to evidence presented at her five-day trial, Nguyen was the pharmacist-in-charge of the now-defunct
The beneficiaries were solicited to provide their Tricare insurance information for medications they did not seek out or need, and most were never examined by a physician. The prescriptions were electronically sent from marketers or telemedicine businesses and submitted by the pharmacy for reimbursement even though Tricare rules excluded reimbursements for claims based on telemedicine visits and would not, in any event, have been authorized had Tricare known the prescriptions originated based upon the payment of kickbacks.
Nguyen was aware that the prescriptions were purportedly written by physicians in states other than where the beneficiaries lived, multiple members of the same families received the same medications, and the same prescriptions were written for members of different patient populations, including a 13-year-old boy in
The pharmacy invoiced the beneficiaries to pay hundreds of dollars in required co-payments, but the beneficiaries stated that they knew nothing about co-payments and understood that the medications were fully covered by Tricare, according to trial testimony. The total co-payments due during the scheme exceeded
Nguyen also obstructed a federal audit by providing bogus, cut-and-pasted prescriptions to cover-up Tricare's effort to validate millions of dollars paid for the same prescriptions.
During Nguyen's tenure as pharmacist-in-charge, Tricare paid
United States District Judge
The
Assistant
Press Release Number:
22-251
Updated
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