A Canton orthopedic surgeon has been sentenced to a stint in federal prison for cooking the books in a health care fraud scheme. Dr. Olarewaju James Oladipo, 60, was handed a 16-month sentence by U.S. District Court Judge Allison D. Burroughs, according to a release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Massachusetts.
Oladipo's conviction came after a federal jury found him guilty of 10 counts of health care fraud in December 2023, convicting him of scamming federal programs through phony billing from January 2016 to December 2019, he inflated patient visits with more complex procedures that he never performed, and he supposedly treated a marathon of patients daily with visits that would’ve lasted just a few minutes when the billing codes indicated quarter-hour to 45-minute-long appointments. Jodi Cohen, Special Agent in Charge of the FBI's Boston Division, alongside other agencies, spearheaded the investigation into Oladipo’s high-volume patient flow which was partly fueled by his heavy prescription of opioids, making him one of Massachusetts' top prescribers.
Oladipo's practice caught the eye of authorities not just for the fraudulent billing but also for his role in feeding the opioid epidemic; he notoriously prescribed oxycodone, a powerful and highly addictive narcotic, to those grappling with addiction. The evidence at trial laid bare the grim tactics of a man who exploited both the medical establishment and the vulnerabilities of patients entrapped in addiction, the prosecutors, Assistant U.S. Attorneys Evan D. Panich and William B. Brady, illuminated this web of deceit in court.
In addition to his prison term, the judge has ordered Oladipo to be shackled by one year of supervised release—a slight reprieve after the confines of prison, valuable assistance during the investigation was offered by entities including the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office, the National Insurance Crime Bureau, and the Drug Enforcement Administration, as noted by the collective forces of law enforcement who are speaking out against the white-collar crimes that are fleecing the health care system.
