The Boston Globe

March 23, 1996, Saturday, City Edition

False bills, diagnoses cost doctor $ 1.5 million, prison

BYLINE: By Judy Rakowsky, Globe Staff

SECTION: METRO/REGION; Pg. 19

LENGTH: 466 words

A Newton psychiatrist who invented diagnoses, session notes and bills for patients he never saw was sentenced yesterday to nearly four years in a federal prison camp and ordered to pay $ 1.5 million in fines and restitution.
Dr. Richard P. Skodnek – who attended his three-week trial on charges of massive insurance fraud in cheaply made clothes and with his hair shaved on one side of his head – was also forbidden to work ever again as a therapist.
Skodnek, 48, had used the diminished capacity defense, but a jury convicted him of 136 counts of fraud. Skodnek, whose patients recalled him as impeccably dressed, told US District Judge Nancy Gertner that he regretted that “my life became contaminated by wrongful actions.”
Gertner, however, spoke of the suffering of his patients.
“I am deeply troubled by the fact that Dr. Skodnek made up records of family members he never saw and assessed teen-agers as drug abusers, being sexually dysfunctional or having sexual identity problems,” she said. “It is an information age, and we cede so much to psychiatrists.”
The false records Skodnek created for victims may haunt his victims for years, she said, possibly making it difficult to get medical insurance or a government security clearance.
The sentencing of Skodnek played out before a courtroom full of former patients. Afterward, some of them said the $ 1 million fine and nearly $ 500,000 in restitution that Gertner ordered does not cover the cost of Skodnek’s illegal deeds.
For instance, Cathy Everett said she went to Skodnek when she was in the midst of a divorce from an allegedly abusive physician.
“He kept telling me how much I needed him,” she said of Skodnek. But, as she told the court, she did not need him to falsify a suicide attempt on her records.
On one visit to Skodnek, Everett said, she brought along her mother, Marcia Everett. At that appointment, the doctor manipulated them into putting the daughter’s therapy sessions on the mother’s Medicare bill.
Marcia Everett later cooperated with agents from the US Department of Health and Human Services. She tape-recorded Skodnek during a phone conversation in which he tried to get her to lie to FBI agents.
Cathy Everett, who is facing a custody battle with her former husband over children whom Skodnek diagnosed as having serious behavioral problems without ever seeing them, noted that Skodnek will receive therapy in prison. She added: “I no longer have any money at all to get any therapy.
“He knew how to manipulate the psychiatric community, and he knew what he was doing,” she said.
Gertner rejected arguments by defense lawyer Jeffrey Denner that Skodnek remain free pending appeal and that he be allowed to report to prison on his own. Instead, Skodnek left the court in handcuffs.