Residents of Los Angeles, California, and Henderson, Nevada, and 16 pharmacies scattered between California, Texas, Wyoming, Arizona and Nevada, pled guilty to charges of healthcare fraud, conspiracy to commit fraud, and/or conspiracy to violate the federal anti-kickback statutes.
Those pleading guilty included brothers Mehran David Kohanbash, and Joseph Kohan and their nephew, Nima Rodefshalom.
In addition guilty pleas included pharmacies Insure Nutrition, Inc., Affordable Pharmacy, Inc., ASC Pharmaceutical, LLC, DQD Enterprise Corporation, DTST Ventures, LLC, Econo Pharmacy, Inc., Emerson Pharmacy, Inc., Genorex Pharmaceutical, LLC, Nutrition Plus, Inc., Pharmatek Pharmacy, Inc., Premier Med Services, Inc., Rexford Pharmacy, Inc., Specialty Pharmacy Management of America, Inc., Solutech Pharmaceuticals, LLC, Village Drug & Compounding, Inc., and Vitamed LLC.
The three individual defendants together with the defendant pharmacies engaged in a series of interconnected actions that resulted in misleading advertising associated with supplying what were described to the Court as nutritional shakes.
The defendants secured the patients’ insurance information which in turn resulted in the defendants soliciting the patients to appeal to their respective physicians to prescribe what were described for the Court as High Yield (expensive) medications.
These medications were often compounded, meaning that one or more of the pharmacies mixed together preexisting medications or substances to provide a new or different product.
It was a part of the scheme(s) involved in the guilty pleas that the defendants conspired to promote these medications that often yielded extremely high profits, by manipulating the collection of co pays on various medications to make it appear that co pays were being collected when in fact they were not.
Sentencing is scheduled for April 7-8, 2020 for the individual defendants. Sentencing for the defendant pharmacies has not been scheduled.
For each individual defendant, the law provides for a maximum total sentence of 35 years in prison, a fine of $750,000, or both.
The three defendants and the 16 corporations agreed to forfeiture, restitution, fines and civil penalties amounting to more than $60,000,000.