Physical therapist Hatem Behiry was sentenced to 24 months in prison for his participation in a $30 million scheme to defraud Medicare and the New York State Medicaid Program. Between 2007 and late 2012, on a regular basis, Behiry falsely pretended to provide physical therapy services to patients and falsified medical records in a fraudulent scheme to bill Medicare and Medicaid for non-existent services. Behiry regularly signed medical records to be used in fraudulent billing, in which he falsely claimed to have provided physical therapy services that he did not in fact provide. Generally, Behiry provided no physical therapy services at all to patients, engaging instead in brief pro forma conversations with the patients, and then completing paperwork that was used to bill Medicare and Medicaid for roughly an hour of physical therapy services. Typically, patients were told that they had to remain in the clinic for nearly an hour — which they often did by simply watching television in a waiting room for much of that time, and sometimes receiving massages or making unsupervised use of exercise machines (activities that are not billable to Medicare or Medicaid as physical therapy). In addition, Behiry oversaw a group of other physical therapists, whom he arranged to bring to the Clinics to bill fraudulently for physical therapy services that were not in fact provided. All told, Medicare and Medicaid paid more than $5 million for purported physical therapy services billed under Behiry’s name. As part of the scheme, more than $800,000 was transferred from the Clinics to Behiry’s own company.
