Those who feel a little queasy going to the dentist will have further cause for concern, after a practitioner was convicted for extracting teeth on a sedated patient while on a hoverboard.
Dr Seth Lookhart had sent a film of himself performing the extraction on a sedated patient to several people, setting off a wider investigation into his practices.
On Friday, the Alaskan dentist was convicted on 46 counts, including medical assistance fraud and reckless endangerment.
The patient, Veronica Wilhelm, said she had not consented to being filmed while sedated, nor having her tooth extracted while Lookhart was on the hoverboard. She called his behavior “outrageous” and “narcissistic”.
Records from Lookhart’s phone show him joking in at least one conversation that the hoverboard surgery constituted a “new standard of care”.
On Friday, Judge Michael Wolverton, said that evidence presented by the state showed that Lookhart “believed that he could get away with his fraud indefinitely, and that he believed his scheme was foolproof”.
He said Lookhart believed that unless “someone was standing right next to him at the time, no one would ever know”.
Outside of his reckless dentistry, the doctor was also pushing Medicaid patients to take expensive sedation not normally covered by their $1,150 annual limit for non-emergency procedures.
Private insurance generally does not cover the sedation, so Dr Lookhart offered clients the option of paying a $450 flat fee, while he billed Medicaid as much as $2,049 for the same service.
Since obtaining his IV sedation license in 2015, Dr Lookhart has been paid approximately $1.9m by Medicaid for IV sedation services.
His misdemeanor medical assistance fraud offenses carry a possible sentence of up to a year in jail, a fine of up to $25,000 and and he could be ordered to return funds to the state of Alaska Medicaid program and his former business partners.
Lookhart will be sentenced in April 2020.
