[patrec]

Personally, I find it desirable that people who commit massive fraud in the health care sector get punished severely (based on whatever charges they are actually convicted of), because chances are someone will actually be physically harmed even if that is hard to prove to a standard necessary for conviction (even if no actual harmful treatment resulted, which seems likely in this case, the misallocation of resources to the fraud means someone will likely be deprived of a treatment they would otherwise have received). So IMO 5 years would be insane -- Madoff got done for 10 years, and his fraud was much more benign (I suspect a very significant percentage of his victims knew the returns were to good to be true and that someone was being defrauded; they just didn't realize it was them).