A Whitefish doctor who admitted defrauding Medicare and other federal government health programs through a telemedicine conspiracy that resulted in more than $31 million in false billing was sentenced to six months in prison, to be followed by six months of home confinement, fined $100,000 and ordered to pay $780,509 restitution. The defendant, Ronald David Dean, 64, pleaded guilty in July to conspiracy to commit wire fraud. The case was part of the Justice Department’s 2024 National Health Care Fraud Enforcement Action. The court also ordered Dean to be placed on one year of supervised release after his confinement. The government alleged in court documents that Dean, a licensed physician, was paid by a telemedicine company to sign orders for durable medical equipment that patients did not need. Dean then fraudulently charged Medicare, CHAMPVA, and the Railroad Retirement Board programs for telemedicine office visits that did not occur. The telemedicine company also used Dean’s information to prescribe unneeded and unnecessary covid tests to patients. The conspiracy ran from about January 2022 until July 2023. The total amount billed to Medicare, the VA and the Railroad Retirement Board based on orders Dean signed was $31,432,001, and the total amount paid from those programs was $13,785,724.
As part of the scheme, Dean relied on information provided by people he did not know, with an unknown amount of training or experience, to prescribe braces for beneficiaries he did not see or evaluate himself. Dean frequently did not even talk to the beneficiaries, and when he did it was merely to tell them the braces were approved. Dean had no idea if those people who received braces actually needed them. With the covid tests, Dean provided blanket authorization for the telemedicine company to send out tests to anyone and bill Medicare for as many covid tests as the company desired.
