A former Los Angeles-area physician was sentenced to 24 months in prison and three years of supervised release for engaging in a multi-faceted Medicare fraud scheme and for illegally prescribing thousands of opioid painkillers and muscle relaxers. Kain Kumar, 56, of Palmdale, California, was also ordered to pay $509,365 in restitution, $494,900 in asset forfeiture, and a $72,000 fine. As part of his guilty plea, Kumar admitted that from February 2011 until May 2016, he defrauded the Medicare healthcare benefit program by prescribing unnecessary home health services in exchange for the payment of illegal kickbacks to him from a La Verne, California-based home health agency called Star Home Health Resources Inc. Kumar further admitted that in furtherance of this scheme, he submitted false and fraudulent claims for reimbursement to Medicare for Medicare beneficiaries that he did not personally examine or for patients he only briefly examined. Kumar also admittedly prescribed drugs that were not medically necessary and which were paid for by the Medicare Part D program.
