LOS ANGELES—The former president and CEO of a Whittier medical clinic was sentenced Jan. 22 to over 10 years behind bars for submitting bogus billings to a Medi-Cal health care program that provides family planning services to low-income Californians without health insurance.
Vincenzo Rubino, 59, of Valencia, was sentenced to 124 months in federal prison by U.S. District Judge Otis D. Wright II, who also ordered him to pay $3.81 million in restitution and entered a money judgment of $2.3 million, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
“This defendant took advantage of health-care services intended for people in need,” Los Angeles U.S. Attorney Martin Estrada said in a statement. “Instead of allowing that money to go where it was intended, Rubino stole millions of dollars through sham claims to Medi-Cal for family planning services that either were unnecessary or unprovided.”
Mr. Rubino pleaded guilty in August to nine counts of health care fraud and two counts of aggravated identity theft on the third day of his federal criminal trial in downtown Los Angeles, in which the prosecution had nearly concluded its case.
Mr. Rubino founded, owned, and operated Santa Maria’s Children and Family Center, a Whittier-based medical clinic registered as a non-profit public benefit corporation and enrolled as a Family Planning, Access, Care and Treatment (Family PACT) provider run through Medi-Cal.
From November 2014 to August 2017, Santa Maria’s submitted fraudulent claims totaling nearly $5 million to the Family PACT program for family planning services that were never provided, often using the information of patients who were recruited at off-site locations with offers of free diabetes testing, but who in fact never received the examinations and other services.
To submit many of these claims, Mr. Rubino used the names of two medical providers whom the patients did not see and who did not even work for Santa Maria’s at the time—a physician’s assistant and an elderly doctor who was himself a patient in a skilled nursing facility during much of the scheme, federal prosecutors said.
The Medi-Cal program paid more than $2.3 million dollars on the fraudulent claims, as well as an additional $1.5 million to a pharmacy and laboratory stemming from referrals based on the same services that were never delivered.
