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Chronicle Sections Twenty dentists, including seven from the Bay Area, were accused Wednesday of defrauding the state Medi-Cal system of $45 million by performing unnecessary and in some cases nightmarish work on patients. Working out of three Central Valley clinics, the dentists would subject patients to root canals they didn't need and drill into perfectly healthy teeth, often without enough painkiller. It was not unusual for patients to leave with 20 fillings they didn't need, prosecutors said. In some cases, children were forcibly held down in the dentist's chair and elderly patients were strapped down so they couldn't leave, said Hallye Jordan, spokeswoman for state Attorney General Bill Lockyer. Lockyer filed a complaint in Stanislaus County Superior Court against the dentists, charging them with Medi-Cal fraud, workers' compensation fraud, conspiracy, grand theft, child and elder abuse, assault and intentional infliction of great bodily injury. "These dentists put at risk the health and well-being of hundreds of children and adults by performing slipshod dental services that were unnecessary, ignoring health problems that needed tending and even skimping on appropriate amounts of anesthesia before submitting patients to painful procedures,'' Lockyer said. The complaint charges that Modesto dentist Kyon Maung Teo, who owns Hatch Dental clinics in Ceres, Stockton and Modesto, was the mastermind of the scam in which he recruited dentists from all over California to do fast, shoddy and unnecessary work at his three clinics into which low-income patients were lured by giveaways. Lockyer's office was tipped off to the scam in 2002 by a woman who had accompanied a relative to one of Teo's clinics. She thought she might as well get her teeth cleaned while she was there, Jordan said. "It's horrible,'' said Jordan, noting that the fillings were superficial so they could be done quickly. She said that between November 1999 and December 2003, Teo and the dentists he recruited treated more than 11,000 Medi- Cal beneficiaries. Most of them had never been to a dentist and were lured in by Teo offering gift certificates at grocery stores and free sweatshirts and electric toothbrushes. Of those patients, Jordan said that the state attorney general reviewed 300 files during its two-year investigation. "In every single one of them, we found fraud,'' she said. Jordan said the dentists were suspended from the Medi-Cal program in April 2003. An employee at Teo's clinic in Modesto said that Teo and his wife, Kin Thor Pang, the office manager at the three clinics, were arrested Wednesday morning. Among the dentists charged in the scam were seven residents of the Bay Area: Anthony Galvan of Dublin, Ricky Hung-Tak Lam of Antioch, Duc Sy Nyugen of Milpitas, Rodolfo Ravanera of Oakland, Tri Duy Vu of Sunnyvale, Shiyu Wang of Alameda and Faruk Cenap Yetek of Pleasant Hill. Steve Galvan, a Concord dentist, said his brother was arrested Wednesday and was trying to come up with the more than $100,000 bail to get out of the jail in Martinez. He said that his brother worked at one of Teo's dental clinics about two years ago and left after two months. "My brother explained to me what they were doing and that he didn't feel comfortable about it,'' Steve Galvan said. Pang allegedly trained office staff to complete false dental claims, which included fabricating charts and submitting claims for visits and procedures that never occurred. Dental surgeries were performed with too little anesthesia, and extensive dental work was performed on children without disclosing the extent of the treatment to the parent or guardian, the complaint charges.
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