Elk Grove woman pleads to federal charges in Medicare home health kickback scheme
An Elk Grove woman pleaded guilty Thursday to an illegal Medicare kickback scheme involving home health care facilities in Folsom and El Dorado Hills, U.S. Department of Justice officials announced.
Mariela Panganiban, 48, faces up to five years in federal prison and a fine of $250,000 after the plea deal in U.S. District Court in Sacramento.
U.S. District Court Judge Troy L. Nunley is scheduled to sentence Panganiban on May 20.
Panganiban is but the latest to plea in the federal case involving some $31 million Medicare paid to reimburse more than 8,000 claims for home health care and hospice services provided to Medicare beneficiaries referred to the care facilities in the illegal scheme.
Panganiban, while social services director at a Roseville skilled nursing facility, steered some 100 Medicare beneficiaries discharged from her site to home health and hospice care facilities in Folsom and a home health care agency in El Dorado Hills in exchange for cash kickbacks, according to the plea agreement filed in Sacramento federal court.
The federal agency paid more than $735,000 to the care facilities whose clients were steered there by Panganiban in exchange for kickbacks.
The nearly three-year scheme involving Panganiban was stopped in 2019 by FBI and Department of Health and Human Services investigators, U.S. attorneys in Sacramento said in a Thursday statement. Text messages from Panganiban to one of the unnamed co-conspirators that year containing the lists of beneficiaries she had referred helped investigators break the case.
A Sacramento nurse pleaded guilty in October 2019 to two federal counts of receiving kickbacks tied to the same scheme. John Eby, then 46, and a nursing care coordinator at Mercy General Hospital in Sacramento, was working with federal investigators as part of his plea agreement.
Investigators say the two co-conspirators unidentified in Sacramento federal court documents paid kickbacks and bribes to Panganiban as well as employees at hospitals, skilled nursing facilities and assisted living facilities and their spouses in exchange for the employees steering Medicare beneficiaries to their facilities in Folsom and El Dorado Hills.
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