A federal grand jury in St. Louis has indicted an Overland Park anesthesiologist on charges he conspired to defraud Medicare out of $26 million.
The 25-count indictment of Dr. Scott Taggart Roethle alleges that telemedicine and marketing companies paid him more than $674,000 in kickbacks between 2017 and 2020 to sign prescriptions and orders for patients he had never met.
Between October 2017 and April 2019, the indictment says he ordered knee braces for 3,584 patients for which Medicare was billed $6.5 million.
He also allegedly signed orders for genetic tests after receiving an email from a company called Encore Telemedicine/Locum Tenens USA asking if he was interested in signing about 180 genetic test orders.
The labs that received those tests billed $53 million to Medicare, which ended up paying more than $18 million for 2,853 patients for whom Roethle signed orders.
The indictment also charges that Roethle ordered medically unnecessary topical creams for 206 patients, causing Medicare to pay out more than $365,000.
Source: Overland Park doctor accused in $26 million Medicare fraud scheme / Shawnee Mission Post