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A former Huntsville doctor, who was the nation’s highest Medicare prescriber of opioid painkillers, was sentenced today to serve 15 years in federal prison.
Shelinder Aggarwal pleaded guilty late last year to illegally prescribing controlled substances and conducting at least $9.5 million in health care fraud.
The fraud included millions in unneeded and unused urine tests, according to an announcement from Acting U.S. Attorney Robert Posey and FBI Special Agent in Charge Roger C. Stanton.
Aggarwal must report to prison April 12 and will be on supervised release for three years after completing his prison stay.
U.S. District Judge R. David Proctor handed down the sentence, which is based on a binding plea deal Aggarwal reached with the government in September.
Aggarwal, formerly a pain management doctor operating Chronic Pain Care Services on Turner Street Southwest, agreed to pay $6.7 million in restitution to Medicare and Blue Cross Blue Shield of Alabama. He also agreed to give up the clinic.
Alabama pharmacies filled about 110,013 of Aggarwal’s prescriptions for controlled substances in 2012, according to the state’s Prescription Drug Monitoring Program. That would equal about 423 prescriptions per day if he worked five days a week, and resulted in about 12.3 million pills.
The PDMP rated Aggarwal as the highest prescriber of controlled substances filled in Alabama in 2012, with the next highest prescriber writing a third as many prescriptions.