Man jailed for defrauding Medicare with penis pumps

Medicare fraud

The law struck hard on a man for defrauding Medicare with penis pumps. Basically, he sent penis pumps free of charge to the Medicare patients, who never ordered the product, and then billed Medicare for $2.2 million claiming necessities ordered by the physicians.

An Illinois man, Gary Winner, 50, was sentenced to three years in prison for defrauding Medicare and seniors with erectile pumps. In addition, he will serve three years of supervised release after his prison sentence, pay a $12,500 fine and reimburse $2.2 millions to the Medicare.

Winner plotted a scam through his online medical equipment company, Planned Eldercare, based in Buffalo Grove, Ill. He bought penis enlargers for about $26 each from adult toy shops and repackaged them with the claim that these erectile pumps helped with bladder control, urinary flow and prostate comfort.

Then, Winner approached seniors with diabetes and arthritis and offered them free products by waiving co-payments, in violation of Medicare policy, and got their Medicare information. Since patients did not pay anything, they did not report the fraud to the Medicare.

Winner would then approach Medicare and claim that this device cures erectile dysfunction (ED) and was ordered by the physicians for the patients. Medicare was billed for a useless product, an average of $284 each, for a total of $370,305.

In addition, he billed $1.8 million to Medicare for arthritic packages falsely claiming they were ordered by Medicare patients and their physicians. With this scheme, he got a total of $2.2 million from Medicare over four years.

When Winner’s employees objected to shipping the product to a person who does not need it or did not order, they were told not to worry because it is does not cost patient anything, instead, the government is paying for it and they can print more money. When the patients called about having received the product they did not order, they were told not to worry and put the product under the sink.

For his crimes involving the introduction of an adulterated and misbranded medical device into interstate commerce, fraud and money laundering, he faced 33 years in prison. It seems he got it rather easy and will be out of the jail a lot sooner.

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Reference

USAToday (Medicare fraudster gets 3 years in erectile pump case)