Jacklyn Price, owner of two Detroit health clinics, was sentenced to 13 years in prison Nov. 15 for her role in an $8.9 million fraud scheme involving Medicare claims.
U.S. District Judge Robert Cleland, who handed down the sentence, also ordered Ms. Price to pay $6.35 million in restitution along with her co-conspirators and to forfeit the same amount.
The sentence stems from a lawsuit that claimed Ms. Price, along with her co-conspirators, falsified claims for home healthcare and other physician services that were not medically necessary, were not actually provided or were provided by an unlicensed physician. In addition, the defendants offered to pay kickbacks and bribes in the form of cash payments or narcotics to Medicare beneficiaries in exchange for the use of their Medicare beneficiaries' numbers. The fraudulent claims were made between 2011 and 2016.
In April 2017, Ms. Price pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit healthcare fraud and healthcare fraud.
Her three co-defendants were also sentence earlier this year. Millicent Traylor, MD, was sentenced to 11 years; Muhammad Quazi was sentenced to 3.5 years; and Christina Kimbrough, MD, was sentenced to more than two years.
Ms. Price owned two Detroit-based Medicare providers, Patient Choice Internal Medicine and Metro Mobile Physicians. Both facilities were closed after Ms. Price's indictment.