LOMBARD – A Lombard dermatologist was sentenced Aug. 28 to seven years in federal prison for insurance fraud, according to a U.S. Attorney's Office Northern District of Illinois news release.
In addition to the seven-year prison sentence, U.S. District Judge John Z. Lee ordered that Dr. Robert Kolbusz pay restitution in the amount of $3,764,381.69. Kolbusz, 58, will begin serving his sentence Nov. 6.
From 2003 to 2010, Kolbusz allegedly submitted thousands of false claims to Medicare and private insurers for alleged skin cancer treatments that were unnecessary or never performed, causing them to pay more than $3.7 million, according to the release.
Many of the treatments billed by Kolbusz were cosmetic procedures performed by non-medical professionals from his office on benign skin conditions that normally would not have qualified for insurance coverage, the release stated.
Kolbusz falsely diagnosed skin conditions as large numbers of precancerous actinic keratosis lesions, and claimed procedures were needed to destroy them, costing up to $352.40 per treatment, according to the release.
One patient, who was a teenager at the time, testified during trial that Kolbusz's staff performed routine laser procedures that she was told were to lighten her freckles, but in her medical records the doctor stated that he had destroyed about 491 precancerous lesions. Blue Cross Blue Shield of Illinois payed $4,597 for the treatments, according to the release.
A jury convicted Kolbusz last year of three counts of wire fraud and three counts of mail fraud, the news release stated.