A former Van Nuys doctor who recently… surrendered his medical license has agreed to a $15 million federal settlement following allegations of sexual harassment over allegations that he and co-defendants submitted false claims to Medicare and Medi-Cal.
The U.S. Department of Justice accused Mohammad Rasekhi, his wife and business partner, Sheila Busheri, the medical center he founded and a laboratory he co-owned, of engaging in a number of schemes between 2014 and 2022 to defraud Medicare and To defraud Medicaid. the agency said this week.
Rasekhi was the founder and physician-in-chief of the Southern California Medical Center, a family practice group with locations in El Monte, Van Nuys, Pico Rivera, Woodland Hills, Pomona and Long Beach. He and Busheri also co-owned Universal Diagnostic Laboratories, a medical testing facility located in Van Nuys.
Busheri, CEO of SCMC, said the pair deny all allegations. However, “due to the high costs of litigation and issuing a crippling payment suspension, fighting the allegations to prove the absence of wrongdoing meant closing SCMC’s doors, effectively denying care to thousands of underserved patients,” said them in a written statement. “With that in mind, a business decision was made to resolve the matter.”
An attorney representing Rasekhi in the surrender of his medical license did not immediately return a request for comment.
According to the plea agreement, Rasekhi, Busheri and their companies allegedly paid marketers illegal kickbacks to refer Medicare and Medi-Cal patients to SCMC’s clinics. They provided illegal perks and payments outside medical clinics so that they would refer federally supported patients to UDL for laboratory testing, the agreement said, and referred SCMC patients receiving Medicare and Medi-Cal benefits to UDL for testing, in violation with federal laws against self-referrals.
“Kickback and self-referral schemes risk impairing the judgment of health care providers and reducing the reliability of the care they provide,” Brian M. Boynton, Chief of the Justice Department’s Civil Division, said in a statement. “Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries deserve care that is free from the taint of referrals driven by providers’ financial interests.”
Under the terms of the settlementthe defendants will pay $10 million to the government and $5 million to a group of former SCMC and UDL employees who filed a whistleblower lawsuit against their former employers.
California will recover $7 million for Medi-Cal claims related to the lawsuit, the U.S. attorney’s office said.
Rasekhi surrendered his medical license earlier this month, weeks after the Medical Board of California filed a complaint against him, detailing allegations that he sexually assaulted three women under his care.
His lawyer said Rasekhi denied all allegations and chose to waive his right to a hearing and retire from medicine rather than contest the allegations.
This story originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times.
