An octogenarian South Hills pain clinic doctor who admitted to health care fraud in connection to injecting people with steroids they didn’t need so he could bill the government and make money avoided federal prison Tuesday and got probation instead.
U.S. District Judge W. Scott Hardy gave John Keun Sang Lee five years and ordered him to pay $417,960 in restitution to government health care programs he ripped off.
Lee, who ran Jefferson Pain and Rehabilitation Center in Whitehall, had been indicted in 2021 on 241 counts of giving out narcotic painkillers for no medical reason and one injection-related health care fraud count after an investigation by federal and state agents.
Prosecutors said he had illegally distributed oxycodone, morphine, fentanyl patches and other narcotics to five patients who didn’t need any of it.
The grand jury also said that between May 2016 and October 2020, Lee defrauded Medicaid and Medicare by submitting claims for steroid injections no one needed.
The U.S. attorney’s office said Lee gave people the injections, sometimes against their wishes, to increase revenue. They said he would only prescribe them painkillers if they agreed to the injections and made them switch insurance companies to increase his reimbursement rates.
Prosecutors also said Lee paid bonuses to employees for referring them to the facility he owned where he would do the injections, again so he could rake in more money.
Lee’s lawyer, Stephen Stallings, had said after the indictment in 2021 that his client was innocent and unfairly targeted by the Justice Department to make it look like it was doing something about the opioid crisis. He argued that Lee’s treatments were legitimate and that the injections were not a money-making “scheme.”
Lee later pleaded guilty, belying those claims of innocence, but in arguing for leniency Stallings said Lee had run a legitimate practice for decades and helped thousands of patients in pain. He said Lee had used injections as part of his treatment and had many patients who were grateful, some of whom wrote letters to the judge on his behalf. Two medical colleagues also vouched for him.
Stallings said he wasn’t making excuses for Lee’s crimes but said the government’s sentencing papers portray him as a “caricature rather than recognizing that he was a good and caring doctor with a profoundly decent character.”
Assistant U.S. Attorney Karen Gal-Or said Lee stands convicted of compelling patients to receive unnecessary injections in violation of the Hippocratic Oath and deserves prison despite his age.
“Patients who refused or complained were threatened that their prescription opioid medications would be withheld,” she said. “He chose to use his position of authority to require his patients to submit to medically unnecessary injections, which in many cases hurt rather than helped them, and leveraged their dependence on opioids to ensure their compliance.”
She asked for a sentence between 18 and 24 months.
The judge sided with the defense.
In addition to the probation term and the restitution amount, he also ordered Lee to pay a $50,000 fine.
Torsten covers the courts for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, but he's currently on strike. Reach him at jtorsteno@gmail.com.
