An Indian-origin doctor has been sentenced to nine years in prison by a US court for committing healthcare fraud and illegally distributing prescription painkillers.
Pawan Kumar Jain, aged 66, a former physician, was sentenced in federal court in Las Cruces, New Mexico to nine years in prison and three years of supervised release for unlawfully dispensing controlled substances and healthcare fraud, US Attorney John Anderson said.
Jain previously entered guilty pleas in February 2016 to one count of unlawfully dispensing a controlled substance and one count of healthcare fraud.
In his plea agreement, Jain admitted that he previously was licensed to practice medicine in the State of New Mexico and was registered with the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) to prescribe controlled substances, including pain medication.
He admitted that for several years he operated a high-volume “pain management” practice in Las Cruces, and frequently performed only “cursory” examinations of his patients before prescribing narcotics to them without documenting any therapeutic benefit for those drugs in his records.
He specifically admitted examining one patient in November 2009 and that he conducted only a superficial examination of the patient before writing him two prescriptions for methadone that were outside the usual course of medical practice and not for any legitimate medical purpose.
Each prescription was for 270 tablets of 10 mg methadone. Jain further admitted that he committed healthcare fraud because he knew these unlawful prescriptions would be submitted to federal health insurance Medicare for payment and that he intended for Medicare to pay for the prescriptions.
Jain also acknowledged that the patient died two days after filling the second methadone prescription. According to evidence at the sentencing hearing, the patient died of respiratory depression due to the methadone Jain prescribed.
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