Surgeries he never performed: Indian-origin Houston doctor agrees to pay over $2 million to settle medical fraud allegations
Dr Ajay Aggarwal, an Indian-origin pain medicine doctor from Houston, has agreed to pay over $2 million to resolve allegations of medical fraud against him, the US Justice Department revealed.
Between 2021 and 2023, the 63-year-old doctor billed federally funded health care programs like Medicare and the Department of Labor's Workers' Compensation Programs for surgical implants that he never performed.
Dr Aggarwal received thousands of dollars per procedure, but patients received simple devices which required no surgery. And all device placements used to take place at Aggarwal's clinic, not a hospital or surgical center.
'A doctor who uses simple medical devices on his patients, yet bills Medicare for a sophisticated spinal surgery, is billing the American taxpayer, plain and simple,' said US Attorney Nicholas J Ganjei.. 'The Southern District of Texas will ensure that losses to federally funded healthcare programs from fraudulent billing, like what happened here, are recouped and that wrongdoers are held accountable.'
A 2023 document of the DOJ revealed that earlier he was accused of giving unnecessary treatment to federal employees with federal workers' compensation benefits and his pharmacy Medley, which was officially owned by his wife, filed the prescriptions.
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An employee of Medley acted as a whistleblower and said that during his term of employment, he saw patients being sent unnecessary with unnecessary medications being prescribed.
In some cases, the patients did not even see or meet Dr Aggarwal. And Medley employees were allegedly instructed to auto-fill medications on a monthly basis and to use pre-printed prescription pads to submit the prescriptions to DOL-OWCP without consideration of medical need.
The new fraud of Dr Aggarwal came to be reported at a time when foreign doctors are under fire, while several Republican leaders said US needs more doctors and foreign doctors can fill the gap.
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