A Michigan psychologist has been sentenced to more than two years in federal prison for scamming health insurance companies for more than three years.
George E. Compton Jr., 63, was sentenced to 28 months in prison after pleading guilty to a healthcare fraud scheme he ran from 2013 to 2016. According to the US Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Michigan, Compton repeatedly billed numerous health insurance companies for psychological counseling services he did not actually provide.
Compton ran a psychology practice in Coldwater, Mich., and provided a legitimate counseling service to numerous patients. However, after establishing relationships with these patients, he regularly billed their health insurers for counseling sessions that “grossly exceeded” the number of sessions the patients actually attended, the US Attorney’s Office said. In one case, Compton billed a patient’s insurance 100 times when her children had actually attended only eight counseling sessions. On another, he billed a patient for a session that supposedly took place at the same time that the patient was in a medically induced coma.
“Unfortunately, this case represents yet another example of how some healthcare professionals allow their own greed to lead them down the path of defrauding healthcare benefit programs and ultimately harming consumers,” US Attorney Andrew Birge said.
During the period in which Compton ran his scam, health insurers occasionally detected his excess billings. When that happened, he claimed that the extra bills were the result of an honest mistake or a glitch in automated billing software and reimbursed the insurer. When audited by one insurer, Compton created phony counseling notes in an attempt to make it appear as if he had actually provided sessions that he hadn’t.
Over the course of the scam, Compton received more than $800,000 in fraudulent insurance payments and spent more than $410,000 on sound equipment, vacations, concert tickets and other personal items.
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