Temecula Doctor Guilty In $12 Million Medicare, Device Scheme

TEMECULA, CA — A Temecula doctor has been convicted in a $12 million scheme to provide medically unnecessary procedures to Medicare beneficiaries, inflate claims submitted to Medicare and re-package single-use catheters for reuse on patients, the U.S. Department of Justice announced Tuesday. Donald Woo Lee, 54, will be sentenced on March 19.

Lee was found guilty late Wednesday of seven counts of health care fraud and one count of adulteration of a medical device, according to the DOJ. He was on trial for six days.

From 2012 to 2015, Lee engaged in a scheme in which he recruited Medicare beneficiaries to his clinics, falsely diagnosed the beneficiaries with venous insufficiency and provided the beneficiaries with medically unnecessary vein ablation procedures, according to evidence presented at his trial.

Lee billed the unnecessary procedures to Medicare using an inappropriate code in order to obtain a higher reimbursement, a practice known as upcoding.

"In addition, the evidence showed that Lee repackaged used, contaminated catheters for re-use on patients," the DOJ said in a news release. "These catheters had been cleared by the FDA for marketing as single-use only."

Lee submitted claims of $12 million to Medicare for the vein ablation procedures he performed, and received $4.5 million as a result, according to federal prosecutors.

— City News Service contributed to this report.