Clinic owners and operators Jose Martinez and Denisse Martinez pleaded guilty today in U.S. District Court in Detroit to participating in a conspiracy to defraud the Medicare program, Assistant Attorney General Lanny A. Breuer of the Criminal Division, U.S. Attorney Terrence Berg of the Eastern District of Michigan and Daniel R. Levinson, Inspector General of the Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) announced.
Jose Martinez, 33, and Denisse Martinez, 27, each pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit health care fraud before U.S. District Judge Victoria Roberts. At sentencing, which is scheduled for Feb. 18, 2010, both defendants face a statutory maximum of 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.
According to court documents, Jose Martinez, in September 2006, opened RDM Center Inc., a Canton, Mich., medical clinic purporting to specialize in providing injection and infusion services to Medicare beneficiaries. Jose Martinez's then-wife, Denisse Martinez, managed and operated the clinic.
In their pleas, both defendants acknowledged that they hired a physician and other employees to work at RDM Center in order to create the appearance that the clinic was a legitimate health care facility providing necessary services to patients, when in fact, everyone working at the clinic knew that it was operated for the sole purpose of defrauding Medicare.
In their pleas, both Jose and Denisse Martinez admitted that during the time that the RDM Center was open, the clinic routinely billed the Medicare program for services that were medically unnecessary or never provided. Both defendants admitted that they purchased only a small fraction of the medications for which the clinic billed the Medicare program. Both defendants also admitted that patients were prescribed medications at the clinic based not on medical need, but on which medications were likely to generate Medicare reimbursements.
Denisse Martinez admitted in her plea that, despite having no medical training, she completed the clinic's patient records by filling in, among other things, the "diagnosis" and "treatment" sections of the patient charts, which were then provided to the physician for his signature.
According to information contained in the plea documents, Medicare beneficiaries were not referred to RDM Center by their primary care physicians, or for any other legitimate medical purpose, but rather were recruited to come to the clinic through the payment of kickbacks. In exchange for their kickbacks, the Medicare beneficiaries would visit the clinic and sign false documents indicating that they had received the services billed to Medicare. Kickbacks came in the form of cash and prescriptions for controlled substances.