They do things big in Texas.  The latest example is the punishments being handed out for a Medicare fraud scheme at Riverside General Hospital in Houston.

Let’s start with the fraud scheme.  It was Texas-size, too, resulting in a whopping $158 million in false Medicare claims for partial hospitalization program, or PHP, services.  It was also basically as simple as it was big: The schemers billed Medicare for services they never provided.

So on April 1 Sharon Iglehart, former attending psychiatrist at Riverside, received a 12-year prison sentence, along with an order to pay $6.4 million.  Twelve years is a long time, but not nearly as long as the 45 years that former Riverside president Earnest Gibson III got, or the 20 years his son got, or the 40 years former administrator Mohammad Khan got.  It’s the same as Regina Askew’s 12 years.

That’s a total of 129 years of prison time.

Sharon’s case is United States v. Iglehart, No. 4:13-cr-00746 (S.D. Tex. 2016).