Most health care professionals do good, some do very well badly

Guambat reckons we just need to pay these folks more?

Atlanta doctor indicted for Medicaid, Medicare fraud

While under contract to provide group psychological therapy to nursing home patients, Dr. Williams, 72, filed about 95,000 Medicare and Georgia Medicaid claims and was reimbursed about $1 million, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office in Atlanta.

Many of the claims filed during a two-year period beginning in the summer of 2007 were fraudulent, U.S. Attorney Sally Quillian Yates said. In some cases, the patients were dead by the time he reported seeing them, she said. In other cases, they were in the hospital and could not have appeared in the nursing home for therapy as claimed.

Brian D. Lamkin, an FBI special agent involved with the case, said such fraud costs the government and private insurers billions. Acts of "sheer greed" such as those alleged against Dr. Williams are "driving up healthcare costs and are depriving those that really need medical help," Lamkin said.

Pharmacist allegedly netted $3.5M in fraud scheme

John D. Love of Brazil, the owner of the Terre Haute Prescription Shop, faces one count of health care fraud and two counts of money laundering. U.S. Attorney Joe Hogsett said.

The scheme was the largest case of health care fraud and money laundering ever discovered in the Southern District of Indiana, Hogsett said during a news conference Friday.

"I want to make it loud and clear, that when individuals, who through their own greed, take advantage of the health care system for their own greed, take benefits intended to serve the neediest of Indiana's citizens, it will not be tolerated," Hogsett said.

A tip from an outside contractor uncovered information in an audit that prompted the investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the state's Medicaid Fraud Enforcement Unit and other agencies, Shepherd said.

Investigators said Love would enter bogus prescriptions in Indiana's Medicaid system, wait for his claims to be submitted, and then void them before others could see the orders had not been filled. Love billed Medicaid for more than 6,800 units of various prescription drugs from January 2006 through September 2010, while actually ordering only 156 units of the same drugs.

Love used at least $3 million of the profits to pay for four parcels of land, 15 vehicles, a wedding for one of his children and other personal expenses, prosecutors said. Federal authorities have seized property including five Harley Davidson motorcycles, two sports cars, four SUVs, two pickup trucks, one recreation vehicle and funds from multiple bank accounts.

Go on -- eat your veggies

It must be all them commies in the Senate what wants to control your diet.

Senate Backs Biggest Food-Safety Overhaul in 70 Years>

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration would gain more power to police food companies under the bill that passed today in a 73-25 vote. The measure, backed by the food industry, public- health groups and consumer advocates, adds inspections and lets the FDA force recalls, rather than relying on companies to voluntarily remove contaminated foods from store shelves.

The bill had awaited a full Senate vote since winning unanimous approval a year ago by the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. It was prompted partly by recalls of cookie dough, spinach, jalapenos and salmonella-tainted peanuts that killed at least nine people and sickened more than 700 in 2008 and 2009.

The House, which passed a food-safety bill last year, has agreed to adopt the Senate version, bypassing the need for a conference to integrate the two bills, Harkin said Nov. 18. Once both chambers have approved the measure, lawmakers will send it to President Barack Obama for his signature.

The Senate bill calls for the FDA to inspect at least 600 foreign food facilities within a year of enactment, and double its number of foreign inspections in each subsequent year for five years. The measure would require inspections every three years for U.S. manufacturing and processing plants the FDA deems to be at a high risk for contamination, and every five years for all other domestic facilities.

The legislation would require most food producers to develop hazard prevention plans and would give the FDA access to those records when requested. Some local food producers with annual sales under $500,000 would be exempt from that rule under language written by Democratic Senator Jon Tester of Montana, an organic farmer.

“This landmark legislation provides FDA with the resources and authorities the agency needs to help strengthen our nation’s food safety system by making prevention the focus of our food- safety strategies,” Pamela Bailey, president of the Grocery Manufacturers Association in Washington, said in a statement. Nestle SA of Vevey, Switzerland, and Northfield, Illinois-based Kraft Foods Inc., the world’s two biggest food companies, are among the more than 300 members in the group.

The Senate legislation “doesn’t fix the real problem” with the food safety system and may drive up food prices by $300 million to $400 million as companies pass compliance costs onto consumers, said Senator Tom Coburn, an Oklahoma Republican who opposed the measure.

The Senate rejected, in a 62-36 vote, an alternative food- safety proposal by Coburn that would have required FDA technology upgrades and more coordination between that agency and the Department of Agriculture.

“The problem with food safety is that the agencies don’t do what they’re supposed to be doing now,” Coburn said in today’s debate. “They don’t need more regulation; they need less.”

Guambat reckons we ought to keep the foxes out of Congress and put 'em back in the hen-house where they belong.

Guambat wants his salmonella over easy.

This Nobel Prize took guts

"Conventional wisdom" in the medical community has had it that most tummy ulcers are the result of stress and acidity. A whole pharmaceutical product range of anti-acid pills depended on treating the symptom, not to mention all those idiotic "executive stress" contraptions. Proving them all wrong resulted in a Nobel Prize.

The story is told well in the SMH editorial today ( http://www.smh.com.au/editorial/index.html):

"It is the archetypal science story. Researchers discover an explanation for a common ailment. They publish their findings, but so unexpected are they and so contrary to the received scientific view that they are dismissed or ignored by the medical establishment. It takes years of struggle before the findings are accepted and become medical orthodoxy. But once recognised, they open other researchers' minds to fruitful lines of investigation of similar conditions. Now the two Australian researchers have won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine.
"Doctors had believed for 50 years that the stomach was an environment so acidic that nothing could live in it. Stomach ulcers were believed to be caused by a combination of stress and acidity. Colleagues scoffed at first, and so did drug companies. The latter had built a lucrative market for expensive compounds which reduced acidity. They did not cure ulcers, but relieved their symptoms. Many sufferers would have to take them all their lives. If the doctors were right, on the other hand, the painful condition could be cured quickly with cheap antibiotics. There was thus a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. The message got through in large part due to the tenacious salesmanship of Dr Marshall, who, to prove his point, at one stage swallowed some of the bacteria and duly contracted gastritis...."

Read about this in more detail at http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/of-guts-and-glory/2005/10/04/1128191720223.html, from which came the imagery for this post.

A bit of backbone

What do you think a country would do if it had a national health system that every taxpayer supports with an extra medicare levy, and an old, creaky and arguably dysfunctional medical infrastructure (e.g., http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/bureaucrats-blasted-on-spinal-unit/2005/09/23/1126982233637.html; and see http://guambatstew.blogspot.com/2005/09/wheres-fire-buddy.html) and the biggest budget surplus in its history? Cut fuel taxes? Cut the top tax rates? Might there be another prescription for this case of affluenza? Not likely: http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/biggest-ever-surplus-now-for-tax-cuts/2005/09/23/1126982233604.html