Crime

A Los Angeles medical equipment supplier who submitted almost $1 million in false claims to Medicare for expensive, high-end power wheelchairs was sentenced on Oct. 5 to serve 30 months in prison, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.

Adejare Ademefun, 57, was sentenced to the prison term and three years of supervised release and ordered to pay $499,548 in restitution to Medicare.

In February 2010, Ademefun pleaded guilty to health care fraud. As part of his plea, Ademefun admitted that from January 2006 to his arrest in October 2009, he owned and operated Jamef Medical Supply, a fraudulent durable medical equipment (DME) supply company, which he used to submit almost $1 million in false claims to Medicare. Ademefun also admitted he paid illicit kickbacks to co-conspirators for medical prescriptions and other documents he needed to defraud Medicare. His fraudulent billings on power wheelchairs, were among the most expensive DME that a Medicare provider could bill to Medicare. In fact, Ademefun said that approximately 95 percent of all the claims he submitted to Medicare were for power wheelchairs. Ademefun supplied the power wheelchairs to Medicare beneficiaries who were illegally solicited by patient recruiters or “marketers” for medical equipment they did not want or need.

Ademefun said he was deliberately indifferent to the fact that the claims he submitted to Medicare were false even though he knew there was a high probability that the doctors whose names appeared on the prescriptions he purchased from his co-conspirators did not prescribe the wheelchairs. Ademefun also knew that only six doctors were supposedly responsible for referring approximately 50 percent of his business and that approximately 60 percent of his customers lived more than 100 miles from Jamef.

On March 24, 2010, Ademefun’s co-conspirator Leonard Nwafor was sentenced to 108 months in prison for his role in the scheme.