Doctor’s Bid to Change Guilty Plea Rejected

A Palm Springs neurologist has lost a bid to withdraw his guilty plea to Medicare fraud charges on grounds that he had been coerced by his defense lawyer and that his mental state was altered because he was using the diet drug fen-phen when he entered his plea.

After a daylong hearing Friday in Los Angeles federal court, Judge Dickran Tevrizian ruled that Dr. Isaac Sultan made his plea competently and voluntarily. He ordered him to appear for sentencing Sept. 28.

Sultan, who was affiliated with Eisenhower Medical Center in Palm Springs, pleaded guilty last year to four mail fraud counts and admitted bilking Medicare out of $120,000 through a scheme known as “upcoding.”

The government charged that after seeing patients for five minutes or less, Sultan billed the government for examinations that should have taken up to an hour.

In court Friday, Assistant U.S. Atty. Jack Weiss charged that Sultan’s “fen-phen defense is largely made up” and he accused the doctor of making a “cynical and graceless attack” on his former defense attorney, Ronald J. Nessim.

Sultan’s current lawyer, Matthew H. Schwartz, told the judge that Sultan “is not asking to walk here. He only wants a chance to prove his innocence before this court and a jury of his peers.”