Orange County, California – A Southern California man has been sentenced for his role in a brazen scheme that siphoned more than $20 million from California’s Medi-Cal program, exploiting both vulnerable patients and the taxpayers who fund their care.
Oscar B. Abrons III was sentenced this week to four years in jail by an Orange County Superior Court judge for orchestrating, along with two accomplices, a sprawling prescription fraud conspiracy. Prosecutors say the trio targeted Medi-Cal, California’s publicly funded Medicaid program, by luring beneficiaries into an unlicensed clinic called God’s Property, where patients were paid in cash to obtain prescriptions they did not need. Those prescriptions, which included powerful HIV medications, antipsychotics, and controlled substances, were then diverted and sold on the underground market.
Between 2014 and 2016, the scheme operated with ruthless efficiency. Alongside Abrons, Steven Derrick Fleming and Mohamed Waddah El-Nachef played central roles. El-Nachef, an Orange County physician, wrote so many prescriptions through the scheme that he became the state’s top prescriber of HIV medications, according to prosecutors. Fleming has already been sentenced to five years in state prison, and El-Nachef was sentenced to a five-year local custody term and surrendered his medical license…