ST. LOUIS – Two St. Louis area doctors have been sentenced in the past month for federal health care crimes in two separate cases.
Prosecutors with the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Missouri said Dr. Asim Muhammad Ali, 54, admitted to performing health care services for Medicaid patients of Psych Care Consultants, LLC, owned and operated by psychiatrist Dr. Mohd Azfar Malik, 71, in 2024.
Ali said he used Malik’s name Medicare billing number for these visits, which were supposed to include a cognitive function assessment, but admitted that he did not see these patients in person but instead called and asked them a series of questions.
Malik admitted submitting false claims for payment to Medicare, Medicaid, and private health insurers for in-person services while he was either out of the state or the country. In one incident, Dr. Ali performed an intravenous ketamine infusion while Dr. Malik was in Hawaii, while Ali was already under federal indictment and lacked proper registration allowing him to administer controlled substances.
Malik pleaded guilty this past April to two counts of making false statements related to health care matters. In addition to his guilty plea, Malik agreed to surrender his registrations with the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) which allows him to prescribe or administer controlled substances.
Malik was sentenced in August to five years of probation, fined $20,000, and ordered to pay $19,442 in restitution.
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Meanwhile, Ali pleaded guilty on May 22 to one count of conspiracy to illegally distribute controlled substances and maintain a drug-involved premises in the 2024 case.
Last year, Ali pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to illegally distribute controlled substances, one count of illegally prescribing controlled substances, one count of paying illegal kickbacks for referrals, and one count of submitting false claims in a separate 2020 case.
In that case, Ali was involved in a conspiracy to pay kickbacks for urine specimens referred to one of his companies for testing. He also admitted signing prescriptions for controlled substances to patients who appeared to be selling or giving away their drugs. Ali also pre-signed prescriptions for controlled substances for patients at another one of his businesses. He did not see the patients on the dates they received the prescriptions and rarely determined a legitimate medical need for them to be given controlled substances.
On Monday, a federal judge sentences Ali to 70 months in prison and ordered him to pay a combined $1,846,818 for both cases.
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