Talk about nightmares: A federal jury in Boston has convicted sleep apnea specialist Pankaj Merchia, M.D., of healthcare fraud, money laundering, conspiracy to defraud the IRS, and tax evasion. He was indicted on money laundering and healthcare fraud charges in December 2022.
“Over 10 years, the defendant hid millions in income from the IRS and defrauded insurers through his medical practice,” said Assistant Attorney General A. Tysen Duva of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division. “The defendant—a highly educated physician — put greed over his integrity, lining his own pockets through lies and deceit at the expense of insurers and Americans who pay healthcare premiums, then doubling down on his lies and deceit and attempting to hide his ill-gotten gains from the IRS. The Criminal Division will prosecute doctors and other professionals like this defendant who abuse the system, and through their crimes, inflate insurance costs for all Americans and fail to pay their taxes due and owing.”
According to court documents and evidence presented at trial, Dr. Merchia, of Boca Raton, Fla., and Brookline, Mass., was a Harvard-educated sleep doctor who was in charge of several sleep medicine companies. From 2017 to 2019, the defendant fraudulently billed insurance companies millions of dollars for sleep apnea machines that had not been used by his former patients. Dr. Merchia billed up to hundreds of thousands of dollars per patient for the medical devices, even when, in some cases, those patients returned the devices. Dr. Merchia used proceeds of the fraud to purchase a $2.1 million home in Brookline…