Jury finds Miami cardiologist not guilty in Medicare fraud scheme
A jury in Miami acquitted a cardiologist of receiving thousands of dollars in kickbacks as part of a Medicare fraud scheme, the Miami Herald reports.
Michael Bahrami, MD, 61, was found not guilty on Jan. 18 of a conspiracy charge. He had faced up to five years in prison.
Miami physicians Jose Avila, MD, and Kansky Delisma, MD, pleaded guilty last year in the same scheme. The newspaper reported that Avila and Delisma admitted that they accepted kickbacks between 2006 and 2012 for referring patients to three home healthcare agencies, which then submitted $57 million in false Medicare claims.
“Dr. Bahrami has always put his patients first,” David O. Markus, one of Bahrami’s attorneys, told the Miami Herald. “He made legitimate referrals for needy patients and never got paid a dime for those referrals.”
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Executive Editor
Tim Casey joined TriMed Media Group in 2015 as Executive Editor. For the previous four years, he worked as an editor and writer for HMP Communications, primarily focused on covering managed care issues and reporting from medical and health care conferences. He was also a staff reporter at the Sacramento Bee for more than four years covering professional, college and high school sports. He earned his undergraduate degree in psychology from the University of Notre Dame and his MBA degree from Georgetown University.