A Missouri doctor will serve two years in federal prison and a nurse practitioner has been fined in a Medicaid and Medicare scam that involved providing opioid prescriptions to patients without an exam. (Sounds like he was more of a drug dealer than a doctor.)
Brij Vaid, of Ladue, also was ordered to pay $177,000 in restitution for making false claims for reimbursement from both federal health insurance programs.
Vaid, 58, operated St. Louis Internal Medicine with the nurse practitioner, Donna Waldo. He would write pre-signed prescriptions for Waldo and other staff to give to patients without an exam, and then falsify Medicaid and Medicare documents for reimbursement on exams that didn’t happen, according to prosecutors. (In addition to pushing drugs, he also pushed around a lot of falsified paperwork.) The prescriptions were for Oxycodone, Hydrocodone and Xanax.
Waldo, 59, was sentenced earlier in February to four years of probation. She was also ordered to pay a $4,000 fine and $48,669 in restitution to Medicaid.
Today’s Fraud of the Day comes from the article, “St. Louis County doctor sentenced for prescribing drugs without examining patients,” published Feb. 27, 2020 on KSDK-TV’s website.
LOUIS COUNTY, Mo. – Dr. Brij R. Vaid, of Ladue, was sentenced to 24 months in prison and ordered to pay $176,912 in restitution for making a false claim to Medicare, according to a press release from the U.S. States Attorney’s Office in the Eastern District of Missouri.
U.S. District Judge Audrey G. Fleissig made the ruling Wednesday saying, Vaid’s actions “created a reckless risk of bodily injury to his patients, given the powerful prescription opioid drugs that he repeatedly provided to patients,” according to the release.
Read more at, “St. Louis nurse must repay $48,000 for health care fraud,” published Feb. 10, 2020 in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
LOUIS COUNTY – A nurse from St. Louis was sentenced Monday to probation and ordered to repay $48,669 for her role in billing Medicaid for doctor visits when the doctor was out of the country.
U.S. District Judge Audrey Fleissig also fined advanced practice nurse Donna A. Waldo, 59, of St. Louis, $4,000. Waldo admitted in her guilty plea to a charge of making a false claim in October that she saw a patient in 2014 and falsely billed Medicaid as if Dr. Brij R. Vaid were supervising her.
