Dr. Pankaj Merchia billed insurance companies for sleep-apnea machine rentals on patients he hadn't treated since at least 2011 — some of whom had already mailed the devices back to him years earlier. On Friday, a federal judge sentenced him to 58 months in prison for it.

U.S. Senior District Court Judge Nathaniel M. Gorton handed down the sentence, plus three years of supervised release and $1,847,931 in restitution, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Massachusetts. A federal jury convicted Merchia in January on health care fraud, money laundering, tax evasion and conspiracy charges.

Merchia, a Harvard-trained sleep medicine doctor with addresses in Brookline and Boca Raton, ran his fraud through two separate playbooks, prosecutors said. From 2017 to 2019, he kept billing insurers for CPAP and BiPAP machine rentals on former patients — in some cases charging hundreds of thousands of dollars per patient for equipment that had already been returned. He used the money to buy a $2.1 million home in Brookline.

In a second scheme, Merchia billed an insurer more than $390,000 for a CPAP machine given to his own brother. When the insurer balked at paying for a family member's treatment, he simply created a new medical business and resubmitted the same claims under a different name. That money reportedly funded a $250,000 wire transfer and at least $140,000 in stock purchases.

From 2009 to 2019, Merchia failed to report more than $6.5 million in income, falsely claiming his businesses belonged to Dr. Shona Pendse instead. He backed up the lie with a fabricated 2008 sale of the companies, prosecutors said. Pendse was separately charged in 2023; her case is still pending, and she's presumed innocent.

Merchia's sentencing lands amid a federal crackdown on health care billing fraud — the DOJ's 2026 National Health Care Fraud Takedown charged 455 defendants nationwide in connection with more than $6.5 billion in false claims. Assistant Attorney General A. Tysen Duva said Merchia "put greed over his integrity, lining his own pockets through lies and deceit at the expense of insurers and Americans who pay healthcare premiums."

The case was investigated by IRS Criminal Investigation's Boston office and the Insurance Fraud Bureau of Massachusetts. Residents who suspect benefit fraud can report it at 1-855-SCAM-MA-1 (855-722-6621).