Former Washington Football Team running back Clinton Portis is facing up to a decade in prison after taking a plea deal in his health care fraud case, according to NBC Sports.
Portis, who played seven seasons with the Washington Football Team, was among ten ex-NFL players who were charged by federal authorities in December of 2019 for allegedly taking part in a health care fraud scheme.
According to a press release from the Department of Justice, the scheme involved making fraudulent reimbursement claims to an NFL health care fund that paid for some of the out-of-pocket medical expenses of former players.
According to NBC Sports, Portis filed reimbursement paperwork for nearly $100,000 in treatments even though he knew it was highly probable that the treatments weren’t medically necessary. He faced conspiracy, wire fraud, and health care fraud charges for his role in the scheme, according to the 2019 DOJ release.
Just last week, a trial in the Portis case concluded with a hung jury, according to NBC Sports. On Friday, Portis agreed to the plea deal rather than face a second trial.
Under the terms of the agreement, according to Yahoo! News, Portis admitted that he’d played a role in defrauding the NFL health care reimbursement fund. In addition to facing up to ten years in prison, he has agreed to pay nearly $100,000 in restitution to the NFL health care fund.
Luke Mullins is a senior writer at Washingtonian magazine focusing on the people and institutions that control the city’s levers of power. He has written about the Koch Brothers’ attempt to take over The Cato Institute, David Gregory’s ouster as moderator of NBC’s Meet the Press, the collapse of Washington’s Metro system, and the conflict that split apart the founders of Politico.
