A doctor in Oakland is facing up to 30 years in prison after being found guilty of accepting kickbacks for patient referrals, health care fraud, and false statements relating to health care, federal prosecutors said.
A jury convicted Henry Geoffrey Watson of 25 counts of various fraud charges for engaging in three healthcare kickback schemes from 2013 to 2019 while being a licensed medical doctor, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of California said in a statement Wednesday.
One of the schemes the 67-year-old Watson was involved in was agreeing to refer patients to home health agency Amity Home Health Care in exchange for illegal kickback payments. Prosecutors said Watson and employees of Amity and its CEO, Amanda Singh, conspired to pay the doctor regular and recurring amounts, sometimes in the form of cash payments of $3,000 a month, to ensure that he referred Medicare patients to Amity each month.
Source: Oakland doctor guilty of multiple fraud charges in illegal kickback scheme / CBS News Bay Area
I used to see this doctor driving to his rounds to see patients in a hospital here in Berkeley in a Rolls Royce 15 years ago…. That in itself should have been a real wakeup call to federal authorities. Dr. Watson’s office is in what I would call a marginal neighborhood in North Oakland. When you think of the demographic slice of people he was serving, the location of the clinic, and the type of automobile he was out doing his trips to the hospital with It makes me think that he was more than likely bilking the government for a long while with medicare fraud.