A marketer for a Dallas-based pharmacy has been indicted by federal authorities, who said he took in more than $60 million in kickbacks for inducing doctors to prescribe “the industry’s most profitable prescriptions.”
Vinson Woodlee, 68 was charged in the Northern District of Texas with four counts under the federal anti-kickback statute. If convicted on all counts, he could be sentenced to 35 years inprison.
The indictment was handed down by a federal grand jury in Dallas on Wednesday and disclosed by the U.S, Attorney’s Office on Thursday.
The criminal case is being prosecuted by Chad Meacham and Andrew Wirmani, assistant U.S. attorneys with extensive experience handling white-collar fraud cases. As of Thursday evening, court records gave no indication of who is representing Woodlee.
According to federal authorities, Woodlee, a pharmaceuticals salesman, worked closely with two people who have pleaded guilty to unrelated charges in the Forest Park Medical Center scandal, one of the largest medical fraud schemes uncovered in the country. In the current case, according to these authorities, Woodley worked in cahoots with Andrew Hillman and SeymonNarosov, the controlling operators of a crooked pharmacy and laboratory services company, NextHealth.
Woodlee is accused of paying doctors – none of whom are identified in the indictment – to prescribe exceptionally profitable medications, including compound pain cream, scar cream, pain patches, and wellness supplements. Those prescriptions would then be filled by NextHealth pharmacies, which would in turn Medicare and other federal health-insurance programs for the drugs.
Between 2012 and 2018, the indictment said, Woodlee earned monthly “commissions” of up to $278,000 for steering these lucrative prescription orders to NextHealth’s Hillman and Narasov. In all, the U.S. attorney’s Office said, Woodlee was paid more than $60 million in kickbacks. Of that sum, the government said, he passed $16.8 million on to “his” physicians and $30.6 million on to other marketers “who likely passed a portion along to ‘their’ physicians.
NextHealth could well afford those under-the-table payments, according to prosecutors. Over those seven years, prosecutors said, NextHealth fraudulently billed insurers more than $700 million “and received hundreds of millions of dollars in tainted proceeds.”
Separate from their alleged dealings with Woodlee, Hillman and Narasov were indicted in 2016 in the Forest Park case, a $200 million health-insurance billing scam that resulted in guilty pleas or convictions for more that two dozen individuals, including nine prominent Dallas physicians or multimillionaire hospital executives.
Both Hillman and Narasov entered into plea bargains in the Forest Park case, agreeing to cooperate with investigators.
In yet another medical fraud case, Hillman was sentenced to 66 months in federal prison, Narasov to 76 months.