A prominent Florida eye doctor once accused of bribing Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez of New Jersey received a 17-year sentence for stealing $73 million from Medicare by persuading elderly patients to undergo excruciating tests and treatments they didn’t need for diseases they didn’t have.

Dr. Salomon Melgen was convicted of 67 crimes, including health care fraud, submitting false claims and falsifying records in patients’ files. Prosecutors showed that between 2008 and 2013, he became the nation’s highest-paid Medicare doctor, building his practice by giving elderly patients unnecessary eye injections and laser blasts on their retinas that some compared to torture.