MANHATTAN (CN) - A Brooklyn physician was sentenced on Thursday to 21 months in federal prison and ordered to pay $1.8 restitution for paying illegal kickbacks to Medicaid recipients. Muhammad Ejaz Ahmad paid HIV-positive patients $40 for every visit, and referred them to pharmacies he owned with his wife and/or brother and brother in law, prosecutors said.
"(T)he New York State Medicaid program paid the pharmacies at least $2.5 million for services purportedly provided to patients to whom the defendant and his co-conspirators had paid illegal kickbacks," the U.S. Attorney's Office said in a statement. "Most of these billings were for medications that were never ordered from legitimate wholesalers. Instead, the pharmacies provided these Medicaid patients with lower-priced, diverted, and black-market medications or, in some cases, billed Medicaid for drugs that were never dispensed. ... The excess profits obtained from the Medicaid program paid for the kickbacks to patients."
Muhammad Nawaz Ahmad was sentenced to 18 months in prison in December 2008.
Mohammad Tanveer will be sentenced on Sept. 25.
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