Medical Supplier Charged With Fraud : Medi-Cal: The state program for the poor paid an estimated $120 million last year in phony bills for incontinence products.

The owner of an Atwater Village medical supply company has been charged with fraudulently billing Medi-Cal for millions of dollars’ worth of incontinence supplies for the elderly and disabled, a state prosecutor said Thursday.

Senior Assistant Atty. Gen. Steven Adler said Romero S. Policar, owner of Emooko Medical and Surgical Supplies Inc., has repaid $3.5 million to the state, which Adler described as the biggest single monetary recovery in the history of the state’s Medi-Cal fraud bureau.

Policar of Diamond Bar was among 10 people in several cities in Los Angeles and Orange counties charged Wednesday in a scam that last year cost California’s medical program for the poor an estimated $120 million in phony bills for adult diapers, rubber sheets and other incontinence products.

The fraud has appeared in counties throughout the state, but is concentrated in Southern California.

It has reached such proportions that the attorney general’s office has assigned 100 prosecutors and other employees to the cases, Adler said.

Under the scheme, door-to-door hustlers would persuade elderly residents of nursing homes and government-subsidized housing projects to turn over their monthly Med-Cal stickers in exchange for bags of toiletries worth a few dollars, Adler said.

The hustlers sold the stickers, for up to $300 apiece, to unscrupulous medical-supply houses that specialize in incontinence products.

The firms used the stickers to bill Medi-Cal, charging for items never delivered or sharply inflating the amounts delivered.

Adler said Policar’s Emooko firm billed Medi-Cal for $9.6 million in 1988 and 1989 and that “pretty close to all” the bills were phony.

A similar firm Policar owned in Yorba Linda submitted bills for another $692,000, about three-quarters of them fraudulent, said Medi-Cal investigator Dennis Cowan.

Adler said Emooko employed about 15 people who operated a computerized “assembly line” in an office building on Larga Avenue from which tens of thousands of false bills were electronically transmitted to Sacramento.

Policar cooperated with authorities investigating the scam and struck a deal with prosecutors that reduces the maximum jail sentence he may serve from 10 years to one, Adler said.

Dennis Warren, Policar’s lawyer, said his client is scheduled to surrender to authorities within 10 days.

Policar is “going to voluntarily come in and fully explain both the nature and the reasons for his involvement in this,” said Warren. “We’re confident he’ll be treated fairly.”

Adler said incontinence suppliers have “taken advantage of a setup where the scrutiny of the billings is probably not as good as it should be and there’s no control of items you can bill for . . . or amounts you can bill for.”

Medi-Cal’s billing system is under review as a result of the scam, he said.

* FRAUD PRICE TAG IN MILLIONS

Alleged Medi-Cal scam involved other medical supply companies in the Southland. B9