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Spine Surgeon Gets Almost 20-Year Prison Sentence for Fraud

Robert Lowes
January 09, 2017

All along, Dr Sabit has remained behind bars because the federal district court in Detroit deemed him a flight risk. An Afghanistan refugee who became a US citizen, Dr Sabit had entertained ambitions of going into the oil and mining business in his native country, where he claimed politically powerful relatives.

Detroit Area Is a Hotbed for Criminal Medicine

In court papers filed over the past 16 months, Dr Sabit's attorneys cited a number of reasons why their client should receive a lighter as opposed to a heavier sentence. They produced letters from past patients full of high praise.

"You truly have healing hands," wrote one patient. "I am so grateful. I can't thank you enough. My pain is gone." Another patient wrote to Dr Sabit's hospital in California, "I am now aglow with ecstasy because of his success in dispelling my constant head pain."

As for injured patients, his lawyers said, Dr Sabit has attempted to make restitution. And he was "truly ashamed and remorseful for the conduct which brings him before the court."

Dr Sabit composed his own plea for mercy, and not only for himself, but for his family. In a court filing last November, he described how he survived persecution as a Jew in Afghanistan, sold bubble gum and cigarettes in a refugee camp in Pakistan, went hungry as an immigrant in Virginia, and finally won a college scholarship that led to medical school.

"I came from absolutely nothing to become a neurosurgeon and squandered the opportunity," Dr Sabit said. "I do not deny my guilt."

However, the physician's long memo backtracked on previous admissions of guilt, according to prosecutors. "I did not perform surgery that was unnecessary," he said about his practice in California. "I performed appropriate surgeries incorrectly and developed infections in some." However, he had previously admitted to unnecessary surgeries in his earlier guilty pleas.

Likewise, he originally pleaded that he had fraudulently billed third-party payers for phantom spinal fusions in Michigan even though he never installed the necessary metal screws. However, in his recent memo to the court, Dr Sabit said that he had used bone dowels to "facilitate" fusion, which has "nothing to do with the use of metallic screws." Prosecutors countered that Dr Sabit's assertion was "contrary to accepted medical opinion."

Prosecutors said he warranted a sentence that would make other physicians think twice about following in his footsteps. The Eastern District of Michigan, they noted in 2015, is a hotbed for criminal medicine, with some 300 individuals indicted on Medicare fraud charges there from 2009.

"Physicians are the gatekeepers to Medicare and hold the trust of both their patients, and the program," they said. "Dr Sabit's sentence should reflect the particular need to deter physicians from engaging in healthcare fraud."

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