Chicago business owner Mark Sorensen was hit with a three-and-a-half-year prison stint yesterday for his role in a crooked $87 million healthcare fraud scheme. The 53-year-old owner of Symed Inc., a durable medical equipment company, got caught in a conspiratorial web that involved doling out illegal kickbacks to rope in unsuspecting patients for unnecessary medical equipment, making off with a cool $23.6 million from Medicare and other programs in the process.
According to the Justice Department, Sorensen and his cohorts tricked and aggressively pursued patients into accepting medical braces they neither needed nor wanted. Feeding the insatiable maw of greed, sometimes patients got bombarded with up to six different braces. The scam ran from 2015 through 2018, and it saw Sorensen buying patient leads from Bernie Perconti, who sourced them from other participants in the scheme like Craig O'Neil and Christine Anderson. The healthcare system, strained by such acts of malfeasance, was ironically left to foot the bill to the tune of $87 million while the co-conspirators divvied up their ill-gotten gains.
Guilty pleas were collected like falling leaves of autumn with Perconti, O'Neil, and Anderson acknowledging their participation in the scheme in staggered admissions from October 2019, July 2020, and January 2021, respectively. While Perconti and O'Neil await their future fate at sentencing, Anderson already heard the judge's gavel drop in April 2022. Sorensen has also been ordered to forfeit a sum of $1.8 million, a mere fraction of the plunder plundered by these modern-day buccaneers.
The case brought to the forefront a slew of federal agencies with the FBI, the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General (HHS-OIG), the Department of Labor Office of Inspector General (DOL-OIG), and the Defense Criminal Investigative Service (DCIS) Southeast Field Office all investigating the cases. While the sting of justice might not heal the wounds inflicted upon the healthcare system and the trust of the American people, principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Nicole M. Argentieri stressed the importance of holding those who perpetrate such fraud accountable. Assistant Chief Leslie S. Garthwaite and Trial Attorney Jeffrey Crapko from the Criminal Division’s Fraud Section were the ones leading the charge in the prosecution of the case.
