Valley Doctor Sentenced to 3½ Years in $3 Million Medicare Fraud Case

A doctor with a clinic in the San Fernando Valley was sentenced today to 3-1/2 years in prison for bilking Medicare out of more than $3 million by submitting bills for procedures never performed, sometimes involving "patients'' who were already dead.

Pezhman Ebrahimzadeh—who is known as Pez Abrahams—pleaded guilty in January to one count of health care fraud before U.S. District Judge George H. Wu, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office. Along with the prison term, Wu ordered the doctor to pay restitution of more than $3 million and serve three years of supervised release after he is released from jail.

Since entering his plea, state authorities arrested Ebrahimzadeh for allegedly sexually assaulting a patient under the guise of conducting a physical examination, Assistant U.S. Attorney Grant B. Gelberg wrote in court papers filed last week.

The federal prosecutor said Ebrahimzadeh failed to report the March 8 arrest to pretrial authorities, as required by the conditions of his bond.

Ebrahimzadeh, 50, of Calabasas owns the Winnetka Medical Group, a cosmetic health care clinic operating under the name Health & Beauty Clinic, where cosmetic treatments that involve radiofrequency lasers and liposuction are performed.

As some of his patients were Medicare beneficiaries, Ebrahimzadeh obtained their beneficiary information, which was used to bill Medicare for procedures he did not perform, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office.

Ebrahimzadeh also obtained beneficiary information for patients he never treated and used that data to submit other bogus bills to Medicare, according to court papers. For one of about 25 Medicare patients who were dead at the time of supposed treatments, Ebrahimzadeh billed the federal insurance program for seven separate high-paying procedures, altering medical records in an attempt to conceal the fraud, Gelberg wrote in sentencing papers.

"In addition to defrauding Medicare, defendant billed private insurance carriers for similar procedures, some of which he claimed he performed on himself,'' according to Gelberg.

In relation to the phony bills submitted to Medicare, Ebrahimzadeh typically claimed he had performed three expensive procedures: revascularization, ablation of a bone tumor or the placement of a radiotherapy catheter in a breast, federal prosecutors said.

Ebrahimzadeh made those claims despite lacking the equipment needed to perform revascularizations or the placement of radiotherapy catheters, according to prosecutors. Between September 2008 and April 2012, Ebrahimzadeh submitted $7.5 million in bogus claims, and Medicare paid just over $3 million, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office.