Wisconsin Dentist Charged With Breaking Patients Teeth With A Drill In Order To Charge Their Insurance Companies $2 Million In The Past Year To Fix Them
AP- A Wisconsin dentist is accused of damaging his patients’ teeth so that he could bill insurance companies for crown procedures.
Scott Charmoli, 60, of Grafton, was charged Tuesday in federal court with eight counts of health care fraud and two counts of false statements. If convicted, he faces a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.
Charmoli is accused of falsely telling patients that they needed crowns and then using his drill to break off parts their teeth during the procedure. Charmoli submitted X-rays and photographs of the chipped teeth to insurance companies to obtain coverage for the crowns, the indictment says.
Authorities say Charmoli performed more than $2 million worth of crown procedures between January 2018 and August 2019.
Charmoli’s attorney, Nila Robinson, did not immediately respond to an email message left Thursday by The Associated Press.
An arraignment and plea hearing are scheduled for Dec. 30.
This guy gets it. Talk about a job where you're dealing with a customer base that's absolutely clueless.
When you walk into a dentists office you are already a basket case. Anxiety through the roof. Fear and dread like you read about.
When you're sitting in that chair the dentist could tell you that you had to have your tongue cut out because it was rotting the rest of your mouth out and you'd probably take their word for it.
This dentist, clearly preyed upon that ignorance, and took people's complete complete and total trust and turned that into a cool $2 million bucks. And that's just in the past year.
Can't really blame him. He got away with it for who knows how long. I've looked everywhere to find out how he got caught and what tipped people off but no word yet. Guessing he pulled the stunt on a patient either on accident or because he needed a buck and couldn't believe he got away with it. From there it snowballed and before he knew it it just became standard practice for him. Maybe one of his receptionists started wondering why his entire slate of appointments or accounts receivable were for crowns for cracked teeth?
p.s.- Real talk, give this guy the electric chair.
What kind of sick son of a bitch do you have to be to take a drill and crack perfectly good teeth so you can then turn around and put crowns on them? Imagine what else this guy has gotten away with.
Wish I could say I was surprised by the total disregard for morals here but we're talking about Wisconsin after all.