United States v. Nachamie

28 F. App'x 13
CourtCourt of Appeals for the Second Circuit
DecidedJanuary 25, 2001
DocketDocket No. 00-1806
StatusPublished
Cited by1 cases

This text of 28 F. App'x 13 (United States v. Nachamie) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
United States v. Nachamie, 28 F. App'x 13 (2d Cir. 2001).

Opinion

SUMMARY ORDER

UPON DUE CONSIDERATION, IT IS HEREBY ORDERED, ADJUDGED AND DECREED that the judgment of the district court be AFFIRMED.

Defendants-Appellants Alan Barton Nachamie, Lydia Martinez, Jose Hernandez, and Edwin Tunick appeal from their judgments of conviction and sentences imposed in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York (Scheindlin, J.). The superseding indictment filed on February 8, 2000, charged twenty-six counts.

• Count One charged Nachamie, Tunick, Martinez, and Hernandez (together with four other defendants, whose cases were severed for trial, referenced herein as the “doctor defendants”) with conspiring, from 1995 through June 1998, to commit health care fraud, mail fraud, make false statements in connection with the delivery of or payment for health care benefits, submit false claims for physicians’ services to a health care benefit program, and solicit and receive payments in return for Medicare referrals, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 371.
• Count Two charged appellants and the doctor defendants with committing health care fraud, in violation of 18 U.S.C. §§ 1347 and 2.
• Counts Three through Six charged appellants and doctor defendants with making false statements in connection with the delivery of or payment for health care benefits, in violation of 18 U.S.C. §§ 1035 and 2.
• Counts Seven through Twenty Six charged twenty instances of false claim submissions for physicians’ services to a health care benefit program, in violation of 42 U.S.C. § 1320a-7b(a)(5) and 18 U.S.C. § 2.

Following a jury trial: Nachamie was convicted on all counts; Tunick and Martinez, on Counts One through Three and Six through Twenty-Three; and Hernandez, on Count One. On November 22, 2000, Nachamie was sentenced to 88 months in prison; on December 1, 2000, Martinez was sentenced to 44 months in prison; on December 14, 2000, Hernandez was sentenced to 18 months in prison; and on December 21, 2000, Tunick was sentenced to one year and a day.

On appeal:

• Martinez and Hernandez challenge the sufficiency of the evidence to support their convictions;
[18]*18• Nachamie and Martinez argue that the district court made several erroneous evidentiary rulings;
• Nachamie argues that the district court erroneously denied his request for a severance;
• Martinez and Nachamie argue that they were deprived of a fair trial by remarks made by the prosecutor in summation;
• Martinez and Tunick complain that the district court improperly charged the jmy;
• Nachamie argues that the district court miscalculated his offense level under the United States Sentencing Guidelines (“U.S.S.G.”);
• Hernandez argues that the loss amount used to calculate his sentence was clearly erroneous; and
• Martinez contests the district court’s failure to depart downward based on her family circumstances and the aberrant nature of her criminal conduct.

I

A defendant challenging the sufficiency of the evidence shoulders a heavy burden. See United States v. Dhinsa, 243 F.3d 635, 648 (2d Cir.2001). The appellate court must consider the evidence in the light most favorable to the government, see, e.g., United States v. Mulder, 273 F.3d 91, 109 (2d Cir.2001), and “the court may enter a judgment of acquittal only if the evidence that the defendant committed the crime is ‘nonexistent or so meager that no reasonable jury could find guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.’ ” United States v. Guadagna, 183 F.3d 122, 130 (2d Cir.1999) (internal quotation omitted).

Martinez challenges the sufficiency of the evidence to show her knowing and intentional involvement in the submission of false claims for physician’s services to a health care benefit program in the period pre-September 1997 (as charged in Counts Six through Eighteen), on the ground that she had no managerial role of any sort at that time.

The following evidence, viewed in the light most favorable to and drawing all reasonable inferences in favor of the government, was sufficient to support a jury verdict that Martinez knew as early as April 1997 that unlicenced and unsupervised foreign medical graduates (“FMGs”) visited patients’ homes and conducted medically unnecessary tests for which legitimate Medicare reimbursement was not available but was sought anyway through a fraudulent billing operation: (1) beginning in March 1997, Martinez supervised telemarketers who recruited senior citizens on Medicare by using a script that misrepresented, inter alicL, that Nachamie’s program was a “special health program” sponsored by “the federal government” and “funded by medicare”; (2) at the same time, Martinez advised the telemarketers how to “Overcomef ] the Most Common Objections” from the recruits such as “I already have a doctor” and “I feel fine,” despite the fact that Medicare covers medically necessary treatment only, not routine screening tests; (3) four of Nachamie’s employees who worked with Martinez at the Queens office with Martinez witnessed physicians arrive at the office and sign patients’ charts and encounter forms (these forms, signed by doctor and patient, indicate that a visit was conducted and those procedures that were performed), without first observing patients or consulting with the FMGs who performed the tests on the patients; (4) in May 1997, Martinez supervised FMGs, instructing them (a) to conduct numerous procedures upon first visiting a patient regardless of the necessity for such tests and contrary to the encounter form indi[19]*19eating that tests should be conducted only if “deemed necessary by the examining physician”; (b) to conduct “stress tests” but the procedure she told them to use was not an actual stress test; and (c) to “be supervised by licensed physicians” without providing FMGs with a way to contact physicians (indeed, there was no such contact); (5) in August 1997, only four months after her employment with Nachamie commenced, Martinez fired Renee Caesar and upon learning from the operation’s “consultant,” Andrew Messana, that Caesar had contacted the FBI, Martinez closed the Queens office and dismissed the FMGs working out of that office; (6) Martinez had many years of employment experience in the medical field, and knew that billing for procedures not medically necessary was illegal; (7) Martinez conceded that some of the tests billed for were not conducted as represented; (8) Martinez’s testimony that she was never involved in billing or the preparation of certain medical forms at Nachamie’s organization is contradicted by her later testimony that she filled out one such form.

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Bluebook (online)
28 F. App'x 13, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/united-states-v-nachamie-ca2-2001.