Posts Tagged ‘doctors’
Police bust faux-holy water racket – well, one of them!
Italian police have arrested 39 doctors who were selling holy water as a cure for cancer and other diseases…
Those arrested were charged with conspiracy, fraud, personal injury and wrongful practice for selling the holy water, Italy’s ANSA news agency reported.
Customers were told online the miracle cure, called “White Light Water,” came from the holy shrines of Lourdes, Fatima and Medjugorje and cost as much as $263 per vial. Doctors selling the fake holy water often told customers to abandon traditional medical treatment and rely instead on the “frequencies” given off by the blessed water, police said.
Police searched four doctors’ offices in Ancona, Bari, Milan and Venice, where the concoction was bottled and redistributed, plus 4,000 flasks of ready-to-ship water.
Face it. People who believe that water can be changed into something holy that will cure your ills – are ready and willing targets for fraudsters.
The questions before the court – in Italy? Hah! – are these doctors charged with selling phony holy water? What if they sold “official” holy water with a spif to the Catholic Church?
Never mind that last question. I already know the answer to that one. Including the part about not paying taxes on the sale.
Obama ready to publish payments to doctors from drug companies
…The Obama administration is poised to require drug companies to disclose the payments they make to doctors for research, consulting, speaking, travel and entertainment. Many researchers have found evidence that such payments can influence doctors’ treatment decisions and contribute to higher costs by encouraging the use of more expensive drugs and medical devices…
The Times has found that doctors who take money from drug makers often practice medicine differently from those who do not and that they are more willing to prescribe drugs in risky and unapproved ways, such as prescribing powerful antipsychotic medicines for children.
Under the new standards, if a company has just one product covered by Medicare or Medicaid, it will have to disclose all its payments to doctors other than its own employees. The federal government will post the payment data on a Web site where it will be available to the public.
Manufacturers of prescription drugs and devices will have to report if they pay a doctor to help develop, assess and promote new products…Royalty payments to doctors, for inventions or discoveries, and payments to teaching hospitals for research or other activities will also have to be reported…
Allan J. Coukell, a pharmacist and consumer advocate at the Pew Charitable Trusts, said: “Patients want to know they are getting treatment based on medical evidence, not a lunch or a financial relationship. They want to know if their doctor has a financial relationship with a pharmaceutical company, but they are often uncomfortable asking the doctor directly…”
Although the Congressional Budget Office does not predict immediate savings, it has said that, “over time, disclosure has the potential to reduce spending,” by reducing instances of overprescribing.
The law also requires drug and device companies to report the amount of “any ownership or investment interest” held by doctors or their immediate family members, other than holdings of publicly traded stocks.
The administration intends to apply the same disclosure requirements to doctor-owned companies that distribute medical devices. Such companies allow doctors to benefit financially from sales of devices they use in surgery.
The same political Sluggos who refused to support oversight of investment banks and sleazy sub-prime investments want us to presume that the ethics missing from Wall Street – are completely in place among millionaire doctors. Frankly, if you walk through their country clubs, I think you would have a hard time telling one from the other. Maybe the doctors have cleaner hands because it’s required of their craft.
But, corporate payoffs and kickbacks are not the sort of business practices that have ever inspired confidence in honesty in my lifetime.
Here’s a shock – Doctors paid for cardiac tests order more of them
Doctors who earn money for cardiac stress testing are much more likely to prescribe the tests than those who don’t, a new study has found.
Researchers at Duke University studied data on 17,847 patients nationwide who had cardiac bypass surgery or coronary angioplasty, checking to see how often doctors prescribed nuclear stress tests and echocardiograms later than 90 days after discharge…
Among doctors who billed for administering and interpreting a stress test, 12.6 percent prescribed the test, compared with 5 percent of those who were not paid for testing. Results for echocardiograms were similar: 2.8 percent of patients were tested by doctors who billed for both test and interpretation, and 0.4 percent by those who were paid for neither.
After controlling for the patient’s age and disease characteristics, the doctor’s specialty and other factors, researchers found that a patient of a doctor earning money from testing was more than twice as likely to be tested as a patient of a doctor without financial interest in the tests.
“If you’re having symptoms or a change in health status, testing is appropriate,” said Dr. Bimal R. Shah, the lead author of the analysis and a fellow in cardiology at Duke. “But in situations where there aren’t any clinical indications for tests, these reimbursement structures seem to be associated with increased testing use.”
Do you think so? Cripes.
I had one doctor who sent me for a battery of tests at an eye clinic that cost Medicare a bundle – when the headaches I was experiencing actually meant that New Mexico’s hardy and aggressive range of pollen had finally caught up with me and I had developed hayfever.
Yes, I found that he got a spif for the referral – and, no, I never went to him, again.
Glaxo paying $3 Billion fine for fraud and deceptive marketing
The British drug company GlaxoSmithKline said Thursday that it had agreed to pay $3 billion to settle United States government civil and criminal investigations into its sales practices for numerous drugs.
The settlement would be the largest yet in a wave of federal cases against pharmaceutical companies accused of illegal marketing, surpassing the previous record of $2.3 billion paid by Pfizer in 2009. In recent years, drug companies have been prime targets of federal fraud investigations, which have recovered tens of billions of dollars for Medicaid and Medicare.
The cases against GlaxoSmithKline include illegal marketing of Avandia, a diabetes drug that was severely restricted last year after it was linked to heart risks. Federal prosecutors said the company had paid doctors and manipulated medical research to promote the drug…I keep forgetting about the “high standards” of our medical professionals.
The agreement to settle its biggest federal cases should be completed next year, the company added in the statement. It said $3 billion would settle not only the Avandia case, but also a Justice Department investigation of its Medicaid pricing practices and a nationwide investigation led by the United States attorneys in Colorado and Massachusetts into the sales and marketing of nine of its drugs from 1997 to 2004…
Critics of the settlements made with drug companies argued for stiffer penalties, including prison sentences for corporate officials…How about prison sentences for Congress-thugs who enabled a lot of the fraud?
Patrick Burns, spokesman for Taxpayers Against Fraud, an advocacy group for whistle-blowers, said, “Who at Glaxo is going to jail as a part of this settlement? Who in management is being excluded from doing future business with the U.S. government..?”
Mr. Burns said the health care sector accounted for more than 80 percent of the $4 billion in overpayments recovered by the government in 2010 as a result of whistle-blower lawsuits and resulting fraud investigations by federal and state agencies.
But, don’t worry. The Republicans in Congress just ran a bill through the House to remove jury trials from whistleblower lawsuits. They feel safer relying on judges.
Perish the thought we should have a system of laws and sanctions which involves ordinary Americans who might not understand about treating really important corporations with the proper respect.
Drugs ring used Medicare to buy OxyContin – sold it on the streets
A federal indictment charges 14 people, including an 88-year-old doctor and two operators of a Los Angeles clinic, with running a scheme to illegally obtain and distribute OxyContin pills, carried out largely through insurance fraud. The indictment stemmed from of a two-year investigation. Ten of the defendants were arrested Thursday morning, officials said.
The distribution ring was allegedly run out of Lake Medical Group, where doctors reportedly wrote prescriptions for the powerful painkiller to uninsured patients who did not need it, federal officials said. Defendants also allegedly obtained the pills from pharmacies by fraudulently billing public insurance programs such as Medicare.
Then members of the organization allegedly resold more than 1 million pills on the street for $23 to $27 a pill, raking in millions of dollars in profits.
The indictment also alleged that in some cases the defendants stole people’s identities and Medicare beneficiary information so they could obtain the OxyContin.
Clinic operators Mike Mikaelian, 43, of East Hollywood and Anjelika Sanamian, 52, of Van Nuys allegedly orchestrated the scheme. Two doctors — Morris Halfon, 88, and Eleanor Santiago, 73 — are accused of prescribing the pills to people who had no medical need for them. The other defendants allegedly assisted in the plot by serving as runners, recruiters or posing as patients.
Throw away the key!
As nurses achieve doctorates, medical doctors start to whine
Doctor Patti McCarver meeting with a patient
With pain in her right ear, Sue Cassidy went to a clinic. The doctor, wearing a white lab coat with a stethoscope in one pocket, introduced herself.
“Hi. I’m Dr. Patti McCarver, and I’m your nurse,” she said. And with that, Dr. McCarver stuck a scope in Ms. Cassidy’s ear, noticed a buildup of fluid and prescribed an allergy medicine. It was something that will become increasingly routine for patients: a someone who is not a physician using the title of doctor.
Dr. McCarver calls herself a doctor because she returned to school to earn a doctorate last year, one of thousands of nurses doing the same recently. Doctorates are popping up all over the health professions, and the result is a quiet battle over not only the title “doctor,” but also the money, power and prestige that often comes with it.
As more nurses, pharmacists and physical therapists claim this honorific, physicians are fighting back.
An illegitimate characterization. “Fighting back” implies medical doctors are losing something. The quandary is over their ego-smitten self-worth. Standards for doctorates in most fields, medical or otherwise, allow the term “doctor” for anyone who reaches or surpasses those standards.
For nurses, getting doctorates can help them land a top administrative job at a hospital, improve their standing at a university and win them more respect from colleagues and patients. But so far, the new degrees have not brought higher fees from insurers for seeing patients or greater authority from states to prescribe medicines.
Nursing leaders say that their push to have more nurses earn doctorates has nothing to do with their fight of several decades in state legislatures to give nurses more autonomy, money and prescriptive power.
But many physicians are suspicious and say that once tens of thousands of nurses have doctorates, they will invariably seek more prescribing authority and more money. Otherwise, they ask, what is the point..?
The point is knowledge, skill and understanding. For the nurses. Obviously the point for the doctors is money and status. And money.
Doctor convicted in $154 million surgery scam
A 65-year-old doctor has been convicted of performing unnecessary and dangerous surgeries on more than 160 people in a $154-million medical insurance scam that lured patients by promising them cash or low-cost cosmetic surgeries.
Dr. Michael Chan of Cerritos, one of 19 defendants accused of fraudulently billing medical insurance companies, pleaded guilty in Orange County Superior Court to 40 felony counts, including conspiracy to commit insurance fraud and insurance fraud. He faces up to 28 years in state prison.
Nearly 3,000 people across the U.S. allegedly agreed to undergo unnecessary procedures such as sweaty palm surgeries and colonoscopies at the Unity Outpatient Surgery Center, a Buena Park facility which is now closed.
Recruiters, known as “cappers,” targeted employees from businesses in 39 states who were covered by PPO insurance plans. Prosecutors likened them to “body snatchers.”
Patients, who typically received between $300 and $1,000 per surgery, were allegedly coached on how to describe their symptoms by the cappers who then scheduled their surgeries, assisted them with paperwork and arranged their travel…
Along with Dr. William Hampton Jr. of Seal Beach and Dr. Mario Rosenberg of Beverly Hills, Chan was accused of ignoring basic medical protocol, such as failing to obtain medical information, not meeting with patients beforehand and neglecting to follow up.
The surgeries were mainly performed on weekends. All three doctors were arrested in 2007.
Nine defendants pleaded guilty and have been sentenced, including Hampton, who was sentenced to 16 years in state prison. In addition to doctors and cappers, the defendants include an attorney, an accountant and administrators.
What a delightful crew of all-American crooks. I’m especially outraged because like a number of folks on Medicare, my best option [so far] is a Medicare Advantage PPO – that’s a preferred provider organization. My somewhat mediocre coverage is via Humana – since United Healthcare, yes, that AARP-sponsored wonder, pulled Medicare Advantage coverage from New Mexico last year. Another big-hearted savior.
While the Kool Aid Party and their Republican little brothers and sisters whine and worry about individual old codgers and poor people in general having too much of a shot at decent medical care, the kind of people they rendezvous with at the 19th Hole of their fave country clubs are busy stealing millions of taxpayers dollars.
No surprises here other than the fact that one of these criminal fronts was shut down.
Pharmageddon
Florida’s Governor Scott – investor in walk-in clinics
The Kentucky number plate on Chad’s pick-up truck, parked round the back of a doctor’s clinic in Palm Beach, Florida, reveals that he has just driven a thousand miles, 16 hours overnight, to be here – and he’s not come for the surfing.
“It’s my back,” he says, rubbing his lower vertebrae. “I’m a builder. I fell off the roof and hurt my back.”
That’s odd, as we have just watched him run out of the clinic and over to his truck without so much as a limp. He’s clutching a prescription for 180 30mg doses of the painkiller oxycodone.
Chad is one of thousands of “pillbillies” who descend on Florida every year from across the south and east coasts of America. Some come in trucks bearing telltale number plates from Kentucky, Georgia, Tennessee, even far-away Ohio. Others come by the busload on the apocryphally named Oxycodone Express.
It’s a lucrative trade. Chad tells us he has just paid $275 to the doctor inside the clinic, or pill mill, as it is pejoratively called. The doctor, who can see up to 100 people in a sitting, can make more than $25,000 in a day, cash in hand.
For Chad the profits are handsome too. He will spend $720 at a pharmacy on his 180 pills, giving him a total outlay of about $1,000. Back in Kentucky he can sell each pill for $30, giving them a street value of $5,400 and Chad a clear profit of more than $4,000. If he goes to 10 pill mills in Palm Beach on this one trip he could multiply that windfall tenfold. But then there’s the other cost of the oxycodone trade, a cost that is less often talked about, certainly not by Chad or his accommodating doctor.
Every day in Florida seven people die having overdosed on prescription drugs – 2,531 died in 2009 alone. That statistic is replicated across the US, where almost 30,000 people died last year from abusing pharmaceutical pills.
It’s an American catastrophe that has been dubbed pharmageddon, though it rarely pierces the public consciousness. Occasionally a celebrity overdose will attract attention – Anna Nicole Smith, Heath Ledger, Michael Jackson – but they are specks in a growing mountain of human mortality.
RTFA. If you’re someone who reads and thinks, who cares about their community and family – this is probably something you already are aware of.
Still – a little more ammunition to fire at your Congress-critter is always helpful. Who knows? As we approach the next election cycle a note from you – and hundreds more – may add up to something more meaningful than some smiling lobbyist with a hundred dollar haircut and a check.
Doctors turning Left on universal healthcare
Republican Congressional Troika
With Republicans in complete control of Maine’s state government for the first time since 1962, State Senator Lois A. Snowe-Mello offered a bill in February to limit doctors’ liability that she was sure the powerful doctors’ lobby would cheer. Instead, it asked her to shelve the measure.
“It was like a slap in the face,” said Ms. Snowe-Mello, who describes herself as a conservative Republican. “The doctors in this state are increasingly going left.”
Doctors were once overwhelmingly male and usually owned their own practices. They generally favored lower taxes and regularly fought lawyers to restrict patient lawsuits. Ronald Reagan came to national political prominence in part by railing against “socialized medicine” on doctors’ behalf.
But doctors are changing. They are abandoning their own practices and taking salaried jobs in hospitals, particularly in the North, but increasingly in the South as well. Half of all younger doctors are women, and that share is likely to grow.
There are no national surveys that track doctors’ political leanings, but as more doctors move from business owner to shift worker, their historic alliance with the Republican Party is weakening from Maine as well as South Dakota, Arizona and Oregon, according to doctors’ advocates in those and other states.
That change could have a profound effect on the nation’s health care debate. Indeed, after opposing almost every major health overhaul proposal for nearly a century, the American Medical Association supported President Obama’s legislation last year because the new law would provide health insurance to the vast majority of the nation’s uninsured, improve competition and choice in insurance, and promote prevention and wellness, the group said.
No surprise to me. RTFA for details – for, more often than not, enlightened self-interest is re-entering American politics.
Back alley abortions in Poland generate $95 million a year
A new analysis published by the UK journal Reproductive Health Matters shows that the criminalisation of abortion in Poland has led to the development of a vast illegal private sector with no controls on price, quality of care or accountability. Since abortion became illegal in the late 1980s the number of abortions carried out in hospitals has fallen by 99%. The private trade in abortions is, however, flourishing, with abortion providers advertising openly in newspapers.
Women have been the biggest losers during this push of abortion provision into the clandestine private sector. The least privileged have been hardest hit: in 2009 the cost of a surgical abortion in Poland was greater than the average monthly income of a Polish citizen. Low-income groups are less able to protest against discrimination due to lack of political influence. Better-off women can pay for abortions generating millions in unregistered, tax-free income for doctors. Some women seek safe, legal abortions abroad in countries such as the UK and Germany.
“In the private sector, illegal abortion must be cautiously arranged and paid for out of pocket,” says Agata Chełstowska, the author of the research and a PhD student at the University of Warsaw. “When a woman enters that sphere, her sin turns into gold. Her private worries become somebody else’s private gain.” The Catholic Church, highly influential in predominantly Catholic Poland, leads the opposition to legal abortion.
Since illegality has monetised abortion, doctors have incentives to keep it clandestine, “Doctors do not want to perform abortions in public hospitals,” says Wanda Nowicka, Executive Director of the Federation for Women and Family Planning. “They are ready, however, to take that risk when a woman comes to their private practice. We are talking about a vast, untaxed source of income. That is why the medical profession is not interested in changing the abortion law.”
The kind of “morality” enforced by religious fools, stuck into the Dark Ages. Just in case anyone wonders what might follow the Kool Aid Party and the rest of the Republican Crusaders.
