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Former laboratory CEO sentenced for government drug testing kickback scheme

Medicare fraud Stock photo. (Mohamad Faizal Bin Ramli/Getty Images/iStockphoto)
(Mohamad Faizal Bin Ramli/Getty Images/iStockphoto)

A Bellevue man was sentenced in federal court on Friday for his role in a kickback scheme involving government health care programs like Medicare and Tricare.

According to the U.S. Department of Justice, Jae Lee was sentenced to two years in prison and fined $7.6 million in restitution for conspiracy to solicit kickbacks.

Lee, former CEO of the now-defunct Northwest Physicians Laboratory, was part of a two-year plot to direct government-funded drug testing to two other labs. In exchange of the referrals, the labs paid Lee’s company.

Between 2013 and 2015, the government paid over $6.5 million to the two testing labs. Northwest Physicians Laboratory received more than $3.7 million in kickbacks and attempted to conceal the money as payments for marketing services, the Justice Department said in a press release.

“Mr. Lee knowingly set up a scheme to profit by referring government health care business to other labs –— even more disturbing he tried to play one lab off against another to increase his ill-gotten gain,” U.S. Attorney Nick Brown said in a news release.

Two other individuals convicted for their participation in the kickback scheme are scheduled for separate sentencing hearings later this year.

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