Federal prosecutors requested a maximum prison sentence of almost 20 years for the CEO of Pain MD, a company discovered that hundreds of thousands of injections questionable to patients, many depend on opioids. It would have been one of the longest sentences for a medical care executive convicted of fraud in recent years.
Instead, he got 18 months.
Michael Kestner, 73, who was sentenced for 13 serious fraud crimes last year, faced at least a decade after bars based on federal sentencing guidelines. He was granted substantially lightened due to his age and health on Wednesday during a federal court hearing in Nashville.
The American District Judge, fin trauger, described Kestner as a “ruthless businessman” who financed a “luxurious lifestyle” by turning medical professionals into “puppets” who pressed patients to injections that did not help their pain and sometimes worsened.
“In the eyes of the court, he knew it was wrong, and he really didn’t care if someone was doing in some way,” Trauger said.
But Trauger also said that he was influenced by the defense arguments that Kestner would fight in the federal prison due to his age and medical conditions, including hemochromatosis of blood disorder. Trauger said he had concerns about prison medical care after considering about 200 compassionate liberation requests in other judicial cases.
“Medical care in these facilities,” said defense lawyer Peter Strianse, “has always been doubtful and suspicious.”
Kestner did not speak at the Court hearing, apart from detailing his medical conditions. He did not answer the questions when he left the Palace of Justice.
Pain MD ran up to 20 clinics in Tennessee, Virginia and North Carol According to Federal Court documents.
During the October trial of Kestner, the Department of Justice showed that the injections were part of a scheme of a decade that defrauded Medicare and other insurance programs of millions of dollars when capitalizing the dependence of opioid patients.
The Department of Justice successfully argued in the trial that the “unnecessary and expensive Pain MD injections were largely ineffective because they attacked the part of the wrong body, contained short -lived anory medications but not steroid MD had turned some patients into “human pins cushions.”
“They leaned over a table and were injected repeatedly into their spine,” federal prosecutor Katherine Payerle said during the sentencing hearing on May 14. “Again and again, month after month, to the direction of Mr. Kestner.”
In last year’s trial, witnesses testified that Kestner was the driving force behind the injections, which amounted to approximately 700,000 shots for approximately eight years, and some patients received up to 24 at the same time.
Four former patients testified that they tolerated the shots for fear that MD pain would have cut the recipes of their analgesics, without which they could have been spiral in abstinence.
One of those patients, Michelle Shaw, told Kff Health News that the injections sometimes left it with so much pain that he had to use a wheelchair. She was outraged by Kestner’s prayer.
“I dislike that everything they obtained was a slap on the wrist in what concerns me,” Shaw said on May 14. “I hope that karma will return to him. That he suffers in his last breath.”
This article was reprinted by Khn.org, a national editorial room that produces a journalism in depth on health issues and is one of the central operational programs in KFF: the independent source for the investigation of health policies, surveys and journalism.
(Tagstotranslate) Pain
