The office manager of a defunct Florida telemedicine company testified Wednesday that Dr. David M. Young of Fredericksburg, Texas, filled bogus prescriptions for orthotic devices and genetic tests for thousands of patients he never met or treated.
“If I sent him 25 prescriptions, within 20 or 30 minutes, they were signed,” Pamela Edwin told a jury in the Dallas courtroom of U.S. District Judge Brantley Starr. Many of the prescriptions, she said, were “pre-filled” by nonmedical employees of Sunrise Medical Inc., a motley crew she described as including “hookers, drug addicts … and some regular people.”
She testified that Young, on trial before Judge Starr on charges of conspiracy to commit healthcare fraud and making false statements relating to healthcare matters, electronically signed so many prescriptions that Steven Kahn, the co-owner of Sunrise Medical, switched Sunrise’s agreement with the doctor from paying him $35 to $45 per prescription to “a flat rate of $5,000 a week.”
“Was anybody actually examining the patients?” prosecutor Ethan Womble asked Edwin.
“No,” she replied.
Kahn pleaded guilty in March 2021 in the Southern District of Florida to one count of conspiracy to commit healthcare fraud and wire fraud and is serving 11 years in prison. Edwin, his co-defendant in that case, pleaded guilty under an agreement in which she is testifying for the government against Young and others involved in what’s described in court documents as a scam to cheat Medicare out of more than $39 million.
On cross-examination, S. Michael McColloch of Dallas, one of Young’s defense attorneys, said his client was led by Kahn to believe the prescriptions the doctor signed were based on legitimate examinations of patients by qualified medical personnel, including nurses. That, McColloch said, is what Edwin told federal investigators in an interview less than three weeks ago — a statement Edwin testified Wednesday that she did not recall making.
Her testimony continues Thursday. Judge Starr has told jurors that the trial, which began Tuesday, is expected to last about two weeks.
In his opening statement Tuesday, McColloch said Young, “a dedicated small-town physician,” was a victim of the “crooks” behind a “horrendous conspiracy” in which Kahn and others lied to the doctor when they sent him thousands of patient charts and asked him to evaluate the need to prescribe for those patients orthotic devices, such as knee, ankle and back braces, as well as costly lab tests to determine, among other things, if patients had genetic mutations that could indicate a high risk of developing certain cancers.
“We don’t dispute that there was an audacious, colossal fraud,” McColloch told the jurors. But Young’s only fault, he said, was being “too trusting” and “naïve” when he agreed to work with Kahn.
Young, he said, will take the stand in his own defense, a relative rarity for defendants in white-collar fraud cases.
A June 2023 indictment of Young said Medicare was billed about $39.6 million by testing labs and providers of orthotic braces for “false and fraudulent claims” based on doctor-signed prescriptions purchased from Sunrise and related companies. Of that amount, the indictment said, the government healthcare program paid about $13.9 million.
For his role in the phony prescription scam, Young pocketed $475,000 over a two-year period, Womble said in his opening statement.
“He signed prescriptions while he was on vacation,” the prosecutor said.
In addition to McColloch, Young is represented by Karen Cook of Dallas, Michael E. Clark of the Houston office of Womble Bond Dickinson and Stephen Chahn Lee of Chicago.
In addition to Ethan Womble, the government is represented by, among others, Brynn Schiess of the DOJ fraud section in Dallas.
The case number in the Northern District of Texas is 3:21-cr-00417