Lawrence S. Duran

Lawrence S. Duran, owner of American Therapeutic Corporation (ATC) — a Miami-area mental health company — orchestrated what became one of the largest Medicare fraud schemes in US history. From 2002 until his arrest in October 2010, Duran and his co-conspirators used ATC and a related company, Medlink, to systematically defraud Medicare by targeting patients with Alzheimer's disease and severe dementia at assisted living facilities and halfway houses. The scheme involved paying illegal kickbacks to facility owners, operators, and patient brokers in exchange for referring ineligible patients to ATC's partial hospitalization programs — programs that provided no legitimate psychiatric treatment. Patient medical charts were falsified to make it appear that services had been provided and that patients qualified for the billed treatments. ATC submitted approximately $205 million in fraudulent Medicare claims, of which Medicare paid out roughly $87 million. Duran's 50-year sentence upon conviction was the longest ever imposed in a Medicare Fraud Strike Force case.