Montco ambulance-company owner gets 8-year sentence for fraud

The owner of a Montgomery County ambulance company was sentenced Monday to eight years in prison and ordered to pay $1.9 million in restitution for healthcare fraud.

Penn Choice Ambulance Inc. owner Anna Mudrova, 41, of Huntingdon Valley, pleaded guilty in a scheme to bill Medicare for patients who did not need and were not eligible for ambulance transportation.

Mudrova and six associates, all of whom pleaded guilty, would recruit dialysis patients and pay them to participate in the scheme, court records show.

Penn Choice falsified medical claims to make it appear that the patients were bedridden or required continuous medical monitoring. Medicare paid about $400 per trip, plus mileage, totaling more than $1.5 million from 2009 to 2013.

Penn Choice's manager was sentenced to five years, a paramedic to 27 months and two ambulance drivers to 24 months in prison. Two other defendants are awaiting sentencing.

The company was shut down, and in January the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services placed a moratorium on new ambulance providers in the Philadelphia area. Officials say the moratorium aims to prevent companies like Penn Choice from popping back up under a different name.

- Jessica Parks