Jeffrey L. Fisher, a lawyer for Mr. Dubin, said his client had not used a patient’s identity in any meaningful way, adding that the nature of the conduct mattered. “It has to be a lie about who receives services or who obtains services,” he said, “not a lie about how those services were rendered.”

Near the end of the argument in the case, Dubin v. United States, No. 22-10, Mr. Fisher said the two-year mandatory minimum sentence under the contested provision functioned as “a very strong cudgel to use against people to procure pleas in very low-level fraud cases.”