Medicare Advantage Provider and Physician to Pay $5 Million to Settle False Claims Act Allegations

California-based healthcare provider, Beaver Medical Group L.P., and one of its physicians, Dr. Sherif Khalil, have agreed to pay a total of $5,039,180 to resolve allegations that they reported invalid diagnoses to Medicare Advantage plans and thereby caused those plans to receive inflated payments from Medicare, the Justice Department announced. 

The Medicare Advantage Organizations (MAOs) often compensated Beaver with a share of the payments that the MAOs received from Medicare for the beneficiaries under Beaver’s care. Thus, Beaver had a financial incentive to submit additional diagnosis codes to the MAOs in order to increase the payments that the MAOs received from Medicare. The settlement resolves allegations that Beaver and Dr. Khalil knowingly submitted diagnoses that were not supported by the beneficiaries’ medical records in order to inflate the payments that the MAO received from Medicare.

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