Jacklyn Price, the owner of two Detroit health clinics was sentenced to 13 years in prison for her role in an $8.6 million scheme involving fraudulent Medicare claims. Price owned Patient Choice Internal Medicine and Metro Mobile Physicians, two Detroit-based Medicare providers. Reports say Price and several others had a scheme of falsified claims for home health care and other physician services that were obtained through kickbacks, weren’t medically necessary or weren’t performed. The defendants offered to pay kickbacks and bribes in the form of cash payment and prescription narcotics to Medicare beneficiaries in exchange for the use of their Medicare beneficiary numbers, according to a grand jury indictment. Price specifically would provide prescriptions for medically unnecessary controlled substances, including oxycodone, to Medicare beneficiaries. She then would submit claims for services purportedly provided by Metro Mobile and Patient Choice that were medically unnecessary and not provided to those beneficiaries, according to the federal complaint
Price pleaded guilty in April 2017 to one count of conspiracy to commit health care fraud and one count of health care fraud. Her co-defendant, Millicent Traylor, 47, of Detroit, was ordered in September to serve more than 11 years in prison. According to evidence presented at trial, Traylor and co-conspirators worked to defraud the program through fake home health and physician claims from 2011-16. The evidence revealed they conspired to cause Medicare to be billed for services never rendered, but falsified medical records and signed false documents to make it appear they were. Traylor was convicted in May 2018 of one count of conspiracy to commit health care fraud, one count of conspiracy to pay and receive health care kickbacks, and five counts of health
