An Orange County man was sentenced to 30 years behind bars on Wednesday, Sept. 9 for his role in a healthcare fraud in which, prosecutors say, $269 million in bogus claims were submitted to Medi-Cal for expensive prescription drugs that were not medically necessary and, in many instances, not provided at all.<\/p>\n
Paul Randall, 67, of Orange had pleaded guilty in April in downtown Los Angeles to a single federal count of healthcare fraud.<\/p>\n
He was ordered by U.S. District Judge Mark Scarsi to pay restitution of $178.74 million, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.<\/p>\n
An affidavit filed in Los Angeles federal court states that Randall, Kyrollos Mekail, 37, of Moreno Valley, and Patricia Anderson, 58, of West Hills, took advantage of Medi-Cal\u2019s suspension of its requirement that caregivers obtain prior authorization before providing certain services or medications as a condition of reimbursement.<\/p>\n
The suspension was part of the transition of Medi-Cal\u2019s prescription drug program to a new payment system.<\/p>\n
Prosecutors said that through a business called Monte Vista Pharmacy, Randall and his associates billed Medi-Cal tens of millions of dollars per month.<\/p>\n
Some prescription medications purportedly were to treat pain.<\/p>\n
From May 2022 to April 2023, Monte Vista billed Medi-Cal more than $269 million and was paid more than $178 million for 19 expensive drugs, prosecutors said.<\/p>\n
Randall and others then laundered their illicit proceeds by transferring them to a third party.<\/p>\n
Anderson was charged last year with healthcare fraud. Mekail pleaded guilty to criminal charges in August 2024 and is awaiting sentencing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"An Orange County man was sentenced to 30 years behind bars on Wednesday, Sept. 9 for his role…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":458562,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[163,165,164,7,1312,138,100,171,611,136],"class_list":["post-458561","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-anaheim","tag-anaheim","tag-anaheim-headlines","tag-anaheim-news","tag-california","tag-courts","tag-crime-and-public-safety","tag-news","tag-orange","tag-orange-county","tag-top-stories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/458561","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=458561"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/458561\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/458562"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=458561"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=458561"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=458561"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}