US District Judge Stephen R. Clark on February 19, 2025, sentenced a doctor who ran two urgent care centers in the St. Louis area to 35 months in prison for defrauding Medicare and Missouri Medicaid and ordered him to repay $742,528. Dr. Sonny Saggar, 57, will also be on supervised release for three years after he leaves prison. Saggar admitted that while operating St. Louis General Hospital (SLGH) locations in downtown St. Louis and near Creve Coeur, he and his office manager hired assistant physicians (APs) to see patients but billed Medicare and Missouri Medicaid as if Dr. Saggar had seen them, even when he was out of town. APs are medical school graduates who have not completed a residency program. To legally practice medicine in Missouri, they are required to be closely supervised by a licensed physician under written collaborative practice arrangements (CPAs) that restrict the AP’s ability to provide medical services and limit their practice areas to medically underserved rural or urban areas. Dr. Saggar admitted hiring “numerous” APs from July 2018 to July 2023 to work at the SLGH locations, which he and office manager Renita Barringer advertised as both urgent and primary care facilities and as a “residency prep” program and a “stepping stone” for the APs.
Dr. Saggar admitted that APs were not properly trained or supervised and that he and Barringer advised them to consult each other on their medical questions. One physician can legally supervise no more than six APs, so Dr. Saggar offered stipends of up to $480 per month to various physicians to induce them to sign up to be collaborating physicians, and then submitted CPA forms to the Missouri Board of Registration for the Healing Arts to falsely make it appear as if the APs were being properly supervised. He admitted that the Creve Coeur location is not medically underserved and thus APs are not permitted to work there. Finally, Dr. Saggar admitted that in January of 2022, he hired a doctor who had been indicted in another case to be the sole collaborating physician at the Creve Coeur location but did not disclose to Medicaid that the co-conspirator was performing services there. That physician’s billing privileges with Medicaid had been suspended.
