A Williamsburg wellness center owner was sentenced to 7 years in prison for defrauding Virginia Medicaid and other healthcare programs out of over $2 million. According to court documents, Maria Kokolis, 48, of Williamsburg, owned and operated Pamisage, Inc., a center for integrative behavioral health and medicine, with a focus on weight management issues. Beginning in or about 2018, and continuing through February 2020, Kokolis executed a scheme to defraud and overbill various healthcare benefit programs and the Virginia Medical Assistance Program (Medicaid). She did so by charging 45 minutes to an hour of face-to-face psychotherapy services for noncomparable services, like sending messages through the company’s smartphone app or monitoring a client’s data.
Kokolis billed these psychotherapy services for times when she was out of the country on vacation and when the clients were out of state or sick in the hospital. Kokolis also billed for months of services for people who met her one time and then never enrolled in the program. The fraudulent billing became so extensive that on 332 separate occasions, Kokolis billed for services that exceeded 24 hours in a single day. Kokolis used the names, Medicaid ID numbers, and other identifying information of her clients in submitting these false claims to the healthcare benefit programs. Kokolis received a total of at least $2,202,627.77 in fraudulent healthcare benefit program reimbursements, a portion of which came from the US government.
