Prepare the spit bowl. This story will no doubt make you grind your chompers and leave a bad taste in your mouth.
A Wisconsin dentist has been found guilty of deliberately breaking his patients’ teeth with a drill so he could raise millions of dollars to repair the damage with dental crowns.
The alleged plan of licensed dentist Scott Charmoli, 61, appears to have started in 2015, when the number of crowns he placed increased abruptly. In 2015, Charmoli installed 1,036 crowns, well more than the 434 crowns he installed in 2014. During the royal boom, his income rose by more than $1 million, from $1.4 million in 2014 to $2.5 million in 2015, according to court documents.
From 2016 to 2019, Charmoli billed insurers and patients more than $4.2 million for crown procedures, according to federal prosecutors. In each of those years, Charmoli scored at or above 95e percentile for the number of crowns placed by dentists in the state. A director of a dental insurance company testified during Charmoli’s four-day trial that dentists in Wisconsin installed an average of less than six crowns per 100 patients in 2019. Still, court documents show that in 2019, Charmoli installed 881 crowns for his 1,131 patients – one of about 78 crowns per 100 patients.
According to a federal indictment, Charmoli’s scheme worked as follows: He would take an X-ray or photograph of the patient’s pearly whites, point out a faint line or stain on a healthy tooth, and tell the patient that the stain indicated decay or a fracture that had to be done. are repaired with a crown – a dental cap that goes over a damaged tooth. Once the patient agreed to the procedure, Charmoli set to work with his drill to actually damage the healthy tooth, sometimes breaking off a piece, often a lump. Charmoli would then stop and take another x-ray or picture of the damage, which he would file for insurance coverage to justify the crown. Then Charmoli would install the crown.
royal scam
A former assistant of Charmoli’s, Baily Bayer, testified at the hearing that she thought it was strange that the dentist took X-rays after he started drilling, according to reports by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. But Charmoli would justify the extra photos by saying things like “insurers will want to see this,” Bayer testified.
Despite the suspicious behavior, no one went into detail about what was really going on — until Charmoli stopped seeing patients. In January 2019, Charmoli sold his practice, Jackson Family Dentistry, to fellow dentist Pako Major. In a blog post on the practice’s website, Major reports that Charmoli continued to see his patients there until August 2019. But Major said he didn’t resolve the matter until after he left, he began reviewing the records of Charmoli’s former patients.
“As medical professionals, we swear to do ‘no harm’ to our patients, so I felt an ethical obligation to report activities that I thought were suspicious,” Major wrote in the post. He also said he had “zero knowledge of or any association with Dr. Charmoli’s alleged actions.”
Charmoli was indicted by a federal grand jury on December 15, 2020. By this time, Charmoli’s personal belongings were worth more than $6.8 million and owned vacation properties in Wisconsin and Arizona, according to The Washington Post reporting.
Last week, the jury found Charmoli guilty on five counts of health care fraud and two counts of making false statements regarding health issues. Charmoli now faces a maximum of 10 years in prison for each count of health care fraud and a maximum of five years for each false statement conviction. His sentencing is set for June 17. Nearly 100 ex-patients are also suing him.
