The owner and the medical director of a Kentucky pain clinic were sentenced last week for their respective roles in a scheme that defrauded Medicare, Medicaid, and commercial insurance companies of over $4 million for medically unnecessary urine drug testing. Dr. William Lawrence Siefert, 70, of Dayton, Ohio, the clinic’s medical director, was sentenced to one year and six months in prison and ordered to pay $1,968,763.10 in restitution. Dr. Timothy Ehn, 51, of Union, Kentucky, the clinic owner and a licensed chiropractor, was sentenced to two years and six months in prison and ordered to pay $3,773,569.30 in restitution. According to court documents and evidence presented at trial, Ehn and Siefert orchestrated a scheme in which clinic staff billed for urine drug tests that were not medically necessary but were lucratively reimbursed by taxpayer-funded insurance providers like Medicare and Medicaid. Ehn and Siefert continued in their scheme even as their expensive drug testing machine malfunctioned because it was not properly maintained, which caused the machine to produce results that falsely suggested patients were testing positive for street drugs like ecstasy or heroin. Insurance proceeds from urine drug testing ended up comprising three-quarters of the clinic’s revenue.
