President Joe Biden granted clemency last week to roughly 1,500 Americans, including a former doctor who was convicted of engaging in Medicare fraud and providing cancer patients with diluted chemotherapy drugs.
Announcing the commutations last Thursday, the White House described Biden’s action as the “largest single-day grant of clemency in modern history.” Following the president’s decision to commute the sentences of roughly 1,500 Americans, a report from The Washington Free Beacon revealed that multiple people granted clemency by the Biden-Harris administration were previously involved in serious crimes.
Meera Sachdeva, a former doctor who owned the Rose Cancer Center in Summit, Mississippi, was sentenced in 2012 to 20 years in prison and three years of supervised release for engaging in Medicare fraud. The former doctor was also ordered to pay a $250,000 fine and was required to pay over $8.1 million in restitution.
According to The Center for Public Integrity, Sachdeva participated in “a multimillion-dollar health care fraud case in which prosecutors said old needles were reused, chemotherapy drugs were diluted and public and private insurance was overbilled millions.” The Washington Free Beacon reported that one of Sachdeva’s patients claimed they contracted HIV from an old needle used by her clinic.
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A press release from the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Mississippi noted that the former doctor “admitted billing for more chemotherapy drugs than she actually purchased from drug suppliers from 2007 to 2011.”
The press release explained that Sachdeva’s patients thought they were being provided “an amount of chemotherapy medicine that was equal to the amount being billed to their respective health care benefit programs” but that the doctor was “not providing each patient with the fully prescribed dosage of many of the billed chemotherapy drugs.”
“The health care fraud perpetrated by these defendants was an abuse of public trust motivated by greed,” U.S. Attorney Gregory K. Davis said at the time. “We remain committed to protect the integrity of our health care system and will continue to strictly enforce our federal health care laws.”
The White House claimed that the Americans granted clemency by the president displayed a “successful rehabilitation” and a “strong commitment to making their communities safer.” The White House also said that Biden’s historic act of clemency for roughly 1,500 Americans builds upon his previous criminal justice reform record.
The White House added, “The President has issued more sentence commutations at this point in his presidency than any of his recent predecessors at the same point in their first terms.”