A former Ventura County neurosurgeon has been sentenced to nearly twenty years in prison for his role in a $2.8 million health care fraud scheme in which he caused serious bodily harm to patients by performing unnecessary invasive spinal surgeries.

Aria O. Sabit M.D., 43, has a significant criminal history, dating back to 2010, while practicing at Ventura based Community Memorial Hospital. At the time Sabit was a licensed neurosurgeon in California.

Sabit admitted that, in approximately February 2010, while he was on the staff of a California Community Memorial Hospital, he became involved with Apex Medical Technologies LLC (Apex), which was owned by another neurosurgeon and three non-physicians. In exchange for the opportunity to invest in Apex and share in its profits, Sabit agreed to convince his hospital to buy spinal implant devices from Apex and to use a substantial number Apex spinal implant devices in his surgical procedures. Sabit further admitted that he and Apex’s co-owners concealed Sabit’s involvement in Apex from the hospitals and surgical centers.

As a result of these unnecessary surgeries, about 30 of Dr. Sabit’s patients sued him for malpractice. Community Memorial Hospital cut ties with Dr. Sabit in December 2010 to protect patients.

With his California career in the rearview mirror, Sabit took his practice to Detroit. His fraudulent ways were far from over, however. He convinced patients in Detroit to receive spinal fusions with metal instrumentation, but “subsequent diagnostic imaging revealed that he never installed the hardware, just bone dowels, and never achieved fusion,”.

On Nov. 24, 2014, authorities arrested Dr. Sabit. By May 2015, he pleaded guilty to four counts of health care fraud, one count of conspiracy to commit health care fraud and one count of unlawful distribution of a controlled substance, resulting in losses to Medicare, Medicaid and various private insurance companies.

In connection with his guilty plea, Sabit admitted that he derived significant profits by convincing patients to undergo spinal fusion surgeries with “instrumentation” (medical devices designed to stabilize and strengthen the spine) that he never performed and billed public and private healthcare benefit programs for those fraudulent services.

Sabit further admitted that, in some instances, he operated on patients and dictated in his operative reports – which he knew would later be used to support fraudulent insurance claims – that he had performed spinal fusion with instrumentation, when he had not. Specifically, Sabit fraudulently billed public and private health care programs for instrumentation when, in fact, he used cortical bone dowels made of tissue. Sabit failed to render services in relation to lumbar and thoracic fusion surgeries, including in certain instances, billing for implants that were not provided.

In connection with his guilty plea, Sabit admitted that the financial incentives provided to him by Apex and his co-conspirators caused him to use more spinal implant devices than were medically necessary to treat his patients in order to generate more sales revenue for Apex, which resulted in serious bodily injury to his patients. Sabit also admitted that, on a few occasions, the money he made from using Apex spinal implant devices motivated him either to refer patients for unnecessary spine surgeries or for more complex procedures that they did not need.

Sabit also is a defendant in two civil False Claims Act cases brought by the Justice Department in the Central District of California. These cases remain pending.