Medicare fraud 50-year sentence sets example

In what is becoming a hardening zero-tolerance policy toward healthcare fraud, American Therapeutic Corp. owner Lawrence Duran received a 50-year prison sentence after he pleaded guilty to defrauding the Medicare program out of $205 million, reports FierceHealthcare. Through two now defunct companies, Duran billed Medicare for treatments on patients with dementia that were never delivered. The previous longest sentence in a Medicare fraud case was 30 years in prison.