A southern New Jersey pharmacist has admitted paying tens of thousands of dollars in cash bribes to physicians for referring pain cream prescriptions, federal prosecutors announced Tuesday.
Vladimir Kleyman, a 43-year-old Lakewood, New Jersey, resident who was the president and pharmacist-in-charge of Prescriptions R US, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to pay kickbacks and commit health care fraud. He faces up to five years in prison when he’s sentenced Jan. 20.
From January 2013 through January 2014, Kleyman provided another person with tens of thousands of dollars in cash and checks to provide bribes to physicians for referring prescriptions for a compounded pain cream to his Lakewood-based company.
The firm was a compounding pharmacy, which prepares medication, using different types and dosages of drugs, in order to provide more personalized medications for patients.
Kleyman admitted that in a series of meetings in November and December 2013 alone, he arranged for the middleman to receive more than $40,000 in cash or checks with the understanding it would be used to pay bribes.
Kleyman also admitted he knew certain health insurance carriers, including federal health care benefit programs, did not cover compounded pain cream, but he nevertheless dispensed the pain cream to these patients. He obtained payment from their insurance carriers by falsely representing the pain cream to be other covered items.
Prosecutors say those actions defrauded health care benefit programs out of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Topics New Jersey
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