A former physician and his business partner — both from Southern California — were each sentenced to 33 months in prison for their roles in a $7.1 million Medicare health care fraud scheme at three Las Vegas hospice and home health care agencies, the U.S. Department of Justice announced Thursday.
The former doctor, Camilo Q. Primero, 76, of San Dimas, and Aurora S. Beltran, 63, of Glendora, also were sentenced Tuesday in Las Vegas to serve three years of supervised release after prison and ordered to pay restitution of about $2.4 million. The defendants agreed to make full restitution to the U.S. government.
Each defendant had pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit health care fraud and money laundering.
From about January 2012 to about July 2017, Primero, owner of Angel Eye Hospice, Vision Home Health Care and Advent Hospice, all in Las Vegas, and Beltran operated a scheme to fraudulently obtain $7.1 million from the Medicare program, according to federal prosecutors.
The defendants filed false enrollment documents with Medicare to enable Primero to operate hospice and home care agencies through nominees despite his prior exclusion from all federal health care programs. They also submitted fraudulent hospice care claims for people who were not terminally ill and did not require hospice care, according to the DOJ.
Primero and Beltran were previously convicted in California state court for defrauding that state’s insurance system in relation to another business named Beltran House, a residential care facility for disabled adults, according to the DOJ.
In a separate case, two Glendora men who own San Dimas-based medical equipment companies were arrested on April 9 and are suspected of defrauding medicare out of $34 million by filing false claims for medical equipment that patients did not need. They were a part of a $1 billion international health care fraud scheme that involved many other medical equipment industry executives, doctors, and owners of international call centers.
Staff writer Jonah Valdez contributed to this report.
