This is a Greek tragedy.
When last we reported on ex-physician and former orthopedic surgeon Spyros Panos, he’d gone to prison after surrendering his medical license in New York over a 2013 health fraud conviction.
Panos Arrested
On April 10, 2018, the U.S. Justice Department announced that Panos had been arrested again after being charged with wire fraud, health care fraud, and aggravated identity theft, “in connection with a scheme in which he assumed the identity of a licensed orthopedic surgeon and obtained over $860,000 in payments for reviewing patient files in Workers Compensation cases.
You have to follow this closely.
According to the charges, Panos’ identity theft scam began before he went to jail in that first fraud case and resumed after his release from prison in October 2016. The victim of the identity theft knew Panos and had last spoken to him about one year ago.
Panos pled guilty in 2013 to stealing millions of dollars from health insurance companies by performing up to 20 surgeries per day. He was accused of performing unnecessary surgery on healthy patients and worse, performing fake surgeries.
In February 2018, a medical malpractice suit brought by 260 patients was settled for $45 million with Panos’s insurance carriers.
Panos was released from prison in late 2016 after reportedly serving less than three years of a 4-1/2-year sentence to a halfway house, then to home confinement in Hopewell Junction, New York. That’s when he went back to “work.”
Worker’s Comp Peer Review Company Formed
The government says that in December 2013 (after he pled guilty on October 31, 2013, and before he surrendered to serve his sentence on April 2, 2014) a company called Excel O LLC was formed. The registered agent for Excel was a Panos family member who was not a licensed physician.
According to the state Division of Corporations, Excel was registered by Manuel Freitas. In 1999, Panos married Maria Freitas, daughter of Manuel Freitas, a Park Avenue doorman.
The company offered peer-review services for Workers Comp Claims.
“An orthopedic surgeon purporting to be practicing medicine at ‘Excel Orthopedics’ performed peer reviews for several review companies. The same credentialing information for the Excel Doctor was submitted to five of the Review Companies, and they paid for the Excel Doctor’s peer review services by checks made out to Excel O LLC or Excel Orthopedics.”
