WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. (CN) — Eye doctor Salomon Melgen was convicted of health care fraud Friday after a seven-week trial for bilking Medicare for tens of millions of dollars while administering unnecessary and obsolete medical procedures.
Melgen was taken into federal custody immediately after the jury delivered its verdicts on their third day of deliberations. He was found guilty of all 67 counts, including healthcare fraud, falsifying medical records and submitting fictitious Medicare claims.
He and his medical practice Vitreo-Retinal Consultants of the Palm Beaches billed Medicare more than $190 million between 2008 and the end of 2013. The practice received more than $105 million from Medicare, much of it through bogus diagnoses and unjustified medical procedures, according to the indictment.
Melgen's daughter wept as she and her mother made their way out of the federal courthouse in West Palm Beach Friday afternoon. The two had attended the trial together nearly every day and sat through weeks of deprecating testimony from prosecutors' medical experts.
Melgen appeared consistently expressionless and subdued throughout the trial, though he became more animated during closing arguments, when the courtroom benches were filled with friends and family. He remained stoic when the jury returned the verdict Friday.
The doctor still faces a separate criminal trial, accused of bribing New Jersey Senator Robert Menendez to help him with his Dominican business interests and lobby for him in his billing dispute with Medicare, which dates back more than eight years.
Defense attorney Kirk Ogrosky said outside the courthouse Friday that Melgen and his attorneys will review the trial transcripts and decide what course to take.
"We will look at all of our options," Ogrosky said.
He said Melgen "cares very deeply about his patients and ... tried very hard to help them.”
In the nearly two-month-long trial, Melgen stood accused of falsely diagnosing patients with wet macular degeneration, a potentially blinding disease, as part of the scheme to defraud Medicare.
One of the prosecution's experts, Julia Haller, testified that medical notes in Melgen’s patient charts were “pure fantasy,” and said his diagnostic basis for administering treatments was fabricated in the files she reviewed.
Another medical expert, Robert Bergen, said the amount Melgen billed Medicare was “in the next galaxy.”
Melgen's attorneys put together an aggressive defense, saying that while Melgen and Vitreo-Retinal Consultants may have made insurance coding errors and allowed his medical charts to become inaccurate, he did not act with the intent to commit fraud.
His attorney Matthew Menchel conceded that Melgen’s office used a faulty medical records system, whereby his staff filled out boilerplate diagnoses and retinal drawings before patients were evaluated.
“[The prosecutors] want you to think that doctors’ files are pristine and perfect,” Menchel told the jury during his closing argument. “That's not the real world.”
Melgen’s attorneys said the onslaught of testimony from the prosecution’s experts unfairly vilified him.
“[These] are expert witnesses. They’re not victims of robberies,” Menchel said in the midst of Bergen's testimony.
Haller's damning depiction of the doctor, as a man blinding his patients to line his pockets, was a “miscarriage of justice,” Menchel said in his closing argument.