R.I. doctor makes ‘most wanted’ list

R.I. doctor makes ‘most wanted’ list | Rhode Island news | projo.com | The Providence Journal

01:00 AM EST on Tuesday, March 1, 2011
By John Hill

Journal Staff Writer
A Rhode Island doctor charged with fraud, money laundering and illegally distributing controlled drugs has made the federal Department of Health and Human Services’ 10 Most Wanted list, agency officials announced.

Tarek W. Wehbe, 46, has been a fugitive since he failed to show up for a court appearance in 2008 for a 152-count indictment that accused him of billing Medicare, Medicaid and private insurance companies $2.9 million for drugs he never bought, office visits that never happened and treatments that were never administered.

The DHHS list, posted online at http://oig.hhs.gov/fugitives/ by the agency’s office of inspector general, includes suspects connected to investigations in Florida, California, Michigan and New York City. Wehbe is the only New England case on the list.

The nearly-$3-million figure, the types of drugs involved and the large number of them led to his inclusion in the infamous group.

“For us in New England, he’s a priority,” said Susan J. Waddell, special agent in charge of New England for the DHHS’s inspector general’s office.

The DHHS’s investigators currently have about 170 active fugitive cases, said Donald White, a spokesman for the agency’s inspector general’s office. The agency uses the list to expose the range of cases it works on, he said, as well as ones with large dollar amounts. The list can generate leads, he said, and White said the agency was asking anyone with information about Wehbe to call 1-888-476-4453.

Wehbe, who ran a practice called Renaissance Medical Group with offices in Providence and North Providence, is accused of writing prescriptions for medications such as Percocet, Vicodin and OxyContin in excess of what his practice would have needed. Those drugs are valuable on the street. When the complaint against him was filed in 2008, the government’s estimate was that OxyContin was selling for between 50 cents and $1 per milligram, making an 80-milligram tablet worth $80. Tablets of Vicodin, the government said, typically sold for $4 to $6.

The affidavit supporting the complaint included a statement by one of Wehbe’s patients, identified as “JM,” who said that Wehbe was known on the street as “Dr. Feel Good.”

Wehbe was also charged with billing for excessive office visits, in some cases claiming 30 or more hours a day.

His practice started unraveling in December 2006, when state and federal investigators raided Renaissance’s offices. At the time, he employed five to seven other doctors as well as a nurse practitioner. Between 2002 and 2006, federal investigators said, the practice treated about 8,000 patients, around 4,800 of them Wehbe’s.

Records seized in the raid showed that Wehbe’s records of purchases of chemotherapy drugs didn’t match what he’d billed insurance companies. State health officials at the time said that could have been an instance of conventional billing fraud or worse, an indication that Wehbe was not giving cancer patients the medications they thought they were getting.

In April 2008, those findings prompted the state to suspend Wehbe’s medical license without a hearing, which state law only allows in cases when a physician is deemed to be an immediate danger to the public.

With Reports from Paul Grimaldi and Felice J. Freyer

jhill@projo.com