U.S. District Judge Tucker L. Melancon Thursday sentenced former Lafayette cardiologist Mehmood Patel to the maximum 10 years in federal prison for his conviction on 51 counts of health care fraud. Patel was convicted for billing government and private insurers for medically unnecessary heart procedures.
The Advocate reports today that Melancon called the sentencing a sad day for Patel’s family, for those physicians and patients who respected him and for a medical community that lost a good doctor who, for whatever reasons, deviated from the Hippocratic oath and lost his way. He said it was certainly a sad day for Patel, “a brilliant and talented physician, who at the age of 64 will begin serving a long sentence.”
Read the rest of the The Advocate story here.