John M. Spivey

Introduction

John M. Spivey is a 55-year-old New Orleans man who was ordered to pay more than $7 million in restitution to Medicare for his role in one of the larger genetic-testing kickback conspiracies prosecuted in the Eastern District of Louisiana. According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Louisiana, Spivey conspired with his co-defendant, Jamie P. McNamara of Missouri, to defraud Medicare by billing for cancer genetic testing and cardiovascular genetic testing that was ineligible for reimbursement because it was not medically necessary and was procured through illegal kickbacks and bribes. On October 13, 2026, United States District Judge Darrel J. Papillion ordered Spivey to pay $7,002,410.26 in restitution to Medicare, jointly and severally with McNamara. Spivey had earlier been sentenced to five years of probation, with the first year to be served in home confinement .

Background Information

The scheme ran through a cluster of laboratories operated by McNamara with Spivey’s assistance. Between November 2018 and July 2020, those laboratories obtained doctors’ orders for genetic testing from telemarketers and call centers that used aggressive campaigns to induce Medicare beneficiaries to agree to testing. The orders were signed by purported telemedicine doctors who were not the beneficiaries’ treating physicians, did not perform the consultations, and did not follow up after the testing — the hallmarks of the telemedicine-genetics fraud model that federal prosecutors dismantled repeatedly in the post-2019 enforcement wave. Over that period, the laboratories submitted over $174 million in false and fraudulent claims to Medicare and received over $55 million in reimbursements .

The Controversy or Incident That Led to Their Cancellation

Convicted by plea. Both Spivey and McNamara pleaded guilty for their roles in the conspiracy, and the scheme facts below come from the court record summarized in the U.S. Attorney’s October 2026 sentencing announcement. Spivey’s conviction is final; his restitution was set by court order.

Spivey’s legal exposure arose from his partnership role in the scheme: prosecutors described McNamara as the operator of the laboratories and Spivey as his conspirator-assistant in a billing operation that converted telemarketing-generated “orders” into Medicare billings for cancer and cardiovascular genetic panels that no treating doctor had ordered and few patients needed. The kickbacks and bribes paid to keep the order pipeline flowing were, in the government’s framing, what made the claims ineligible from the start — Medicare pays for medically necessary testing ordered by treating physicians, and this scheme was constructed to defeat both conditions at once .

Judge Papillion’s docket split the two men sharply. McNamara, the laboratory operator, was previously sentenced to ten years in prison and $174 million in restitution, and was ordered to forfeit approximately $7 million in seized funds and three vehicles. Spivey, whose sentencing hearing produced the October 13, 2026 restitution order, received five years of probation with the first year in home confinement — but he shares liability for the $7,002,410.26 restitution amount jointly and severally with McNamara, meaning the government can collect the full amount from either man .

Public Reaction and Consequences

The sentence was announced by U.S. Attorney David I. Courcelle, who praised the work of the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General and the FBI. The prosecution was handled by Deputy Chief Justin M. Woodard and Trial Attorney Kelly Z. Walters of the Justice Department’s Fraud Division — the National Fraud Enforcement Division unit created in April 2026 — together with Assistant U.S. Attorney Nicholas Moses, the Eastern District of Louisiana’s deputy chief of public corruption. The multi-office staffing and the asset-forfeiture and financial-litigation coordinators assigned to the forfeiture and restitution components underline how heavily resourced the government’s treatment of the case was .

For the beneficiaries on the other end of the telemarketing calls, the case documents a familiar harm: Medicare was billed — and sometimes paid — for genetic testing that grew out of marketing scripts rather than medical care, with purported telemedicine doctors lending their signature to orders they had no role in generating .

Current Status

Spivey is a convicted felon by plea, serving a five-year term of probation with one year of home confinement, and owing $7,002,410.26 in Medicare restitution jointly with McNamara. The October 13, 2026 restitution order and the U.S. Attorney’s October 21 announcement of it close out the sentencing phase of the case as far as the public record shows. McNamara’s separate forfeiture — roughly $7 million in funds and three vehicles seized before his indictment — was finalized in an August 2026 order by the same judge .

Impact on Their Career/Life

Spivey avoided prison but walks through the next five years as a federal felon under supervision, with the first year confined to his home and a seven-million-dollar joint restitution judgment hanging over his finances for the rest of his life. His case sits at the tail end of the telemedicine genetic-testing fraud wave, in which labs, marketers, and straw-doctor networks billed Medicare hundreds of millions of dollars for panels nobody’s physician had ordered — and in which the people who assisted the operators, like Spivey, have been pursued to restitution judgments even when their sentences stop short of custody. The government’s message in the announcement was that the enforcement machinery created in 2026 will keep working old cases to judgment: the release closes by tying the prosecution to the new Fraud Division and the White House task force on federal benefit fraud .

Sources

• U.S. Attorney’s Office, Eastern District of Louisiana, “New Orleans Man Sentenced To $7 Million In Restitution For Health Care Fraud Conspiracy,” October 21, 2026 — source