Lawsuit alleges two Las Vegas doctors defrauded insurance companies

A civil racketeering lawsuit claims two Las Vegas doctors have been defrauding insurance companies in cases involving automobile crashes dating back to 2006.

The federal lawsuit was filed Tuesday against Dr. Marjorie Belsky and her husband, anesthesiologist Dr. Mario Tarquino, as well as their respective companies, Integrated Pain Specialists and Mario Tarquino, MD, INC.

The lawsuit, filed by Las Vegas attorney Eron Cannon on behalf of Allstate Insurance Co., Allstate Property & Casualty Insurance Co., Allstate Indemnity Co. and Allstate Fire & Casualty Insurance Co., focuses on the doctors' handling of billings and treatment in cases involving back pain stemming from automobile crashes. It claims Belsky withheld medical records, such as drug tests, if she felt it would hurt the personal injury case, which would then limit how much she could be paid.

Belsky and Tarquino, the lawsuit claims, created "inflated medical bills that would be used to leverage artificially enhanced settlement values to be paid by insurance companies rather than providing patient-centered treatment with the goal of actually treating or healing injuries."

An office manager at Integrated Pain Specialists said neither doctor was available to comment Wednesday.

Between 2006 and 2014, Belsky treated patients who claimed back pain following a crash, according to the lawsuit. She "uniformly" recommended spinal epidural injections, which cost about $15,000 each, for nearly all those patients, even when they were not necessary, the lawsuit claims.

The patients would then be referred to her husband for anesthesia, according to the lawsuit.

"Dr. Belsky would not give a patient the option to see another anesthesiologist," the complaint states. "Dr. Belsky did not want the money to go somewhere else."

Belsky and Tarquino, the lawsuit claims, "prepared and/or caused to be presented" to the plaintiffs medical reports and billing records that falsely reported symptoms, complaints and injuries for each of the 336 claimants identified in the case, which the lawsuit claims were either exaggerated or "not supported at all by the facts of the accident."

The lawsuit also claims that a "vast majority of the time," the injections provided no benefit or pain relief to the patients.

A spokeswoman for Allstate could not be reach for comment Wednesday.

Contact reporter Colton Lochhead at clochhead@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-4638. Find him on Twitter: @ColtonLochhead