Eye Doctor Held on Suspicion of Billing Medicare for False Surgery : Operations: A North Hollywood ophthalmologist is accused of filing 685 false bills over four years for cornea transplants he never performed.

A North Hollywood ophthalmologist was arrested Friday on charges of bilking the federal Medicare program for the elderly of more than $1.3 million through phony eye-surgery bills, authorities said.

Dr. Alan R. Schankman was taken into custody in handcuffs by investigators who climbed through a window in the reception area of his office after a secretary refused to let them into the inner office, Deputy Dist. Atty. James A. Baker said.

Schankman, 43, was charged by the district attorney’s office Thursday with 14 counts of grand theft, Baker said. If convicted on all counts, the doctor faces a maximum of six years in prison.

Schankman and his attorney, Henry R. Fenton, could not be reached for comment Friday. A woman who identified herself as Schankman’s office manager said, “This is all a mistake, and I know it’s going to be cleared up.”

Elliott Kramer, regional inspector general for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees Medicare, said Schankman filed 685 false bills with Medicare over four years. Medicare is the federally subsidized health insurance program for the elderly.

Schankman removed cataracts from elderly patients and filed legitimate bills with Medicare for those procedures, Baker said.

The doctor also filed bills claiming he subsequently performed cornea transplants on his cataract patients. But the cornea operations, which cost $2,000 each, were not done, the prosecutor said.

“His motive appears to be pure greed,” said Baker.

Schankman came under investigation early last year after Medicare officials received an anonymous complaint about him unrelated to his eye-surgery billings, Baker said.

Federal investigators later hired independent ophthalmologists to examine nine of Schankman’s patients. The doctors concluded that the patients had not undergone cornea transplants, the prosecutor said.

Dr. Barbara Mitchell, an ophthalmologist who acts as a consultant on fraud for the state medical board, said false eye-surgery billings have become “a very significant problem” for the Medicare program.

She said unscrupulous eye doctors known as “buccaneer ophthalmologists” drum up business by visiting nursing homes and offering free vision screenings to Medicare recipients.

Although many people over age 60 suffer from cataracts to some degree, she said, “buccaneers” panic the elderly into having immediate surgery, claiming that without it they will go blind.

“It’s pirating their health. It’s pirating Medicare dollars,” Mitchell said. She said only a small percentage of eye doctors can be categorized as buccaneers.

In an article she wrote for the medical board newsletter in November, Mitchell recounted the story of a doctor who told an 89-year-old woman she had cataracts and glaucoma and needed immediate surgery to prevent blindness.

The woman, who is wheelchair-bound, was so alarmed she developed an irregular heartbeat. When she recovered, her daughter took her to the family ophthalmologist, who said she had no glaucoma and only minor lens clouding that required no surgery.