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Show FRANKLY, il'M,.,THf$F GIRLS fKM MMACULA7F CONCEPTION SlJffP 'N 1HEP0LEmLT RUSSMNS Weekly.. gpcctol Medicare-Medicaid still pays medicine's rotten apples Washington There is. a scandalous loophole in the law covering payment of Medicare and Medicaid funds to doctors: Tax money. can actually be paid to doctors who have been run out of one state and hang out their shingles in another. These rotten apples of the medical profession have lost or given up their licenses after being charged with professional misconduct. The charges range from drug ' trafficking and careless prescriptions to incompetence and sexual misconduct. But if the guilty doctors have licenses in other states, they simply move there and set up shop. And as long as they don't cheat on their Medicare and Medicaid claims, the federal government govern-ment continues to reimburse them. The federal funds can be stopped only if the physician lost his license for offenses related to Medicare or Medicaid. The Senate Select Committee on Aging will hold hearings on the problem this week. The committee chairman, Sen. John Heinz, R-Pa., and the inspector-general of the Health and Human Services Department, Richard Kusserow, are determined to plug the loophole that allows tax money to go to these medical miscreants. Our associate Tony Cappacio has seen an advance copy of a report the Senate committee will release. It reviews the cases of 328 medical practitioners who lost their licenses in three states studied Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania. Of them, 21 were charged with sexual misconduct. Yet many of these doctors had licenses in other states, and since they had not attempted to defraud the government, they continued to get paid by Medicare and Medicaid in their new locations. Here are just two of the sexual misconduct cases in the report the Senate Committee will release: A Traverse City, Mich., doctorwas charged with writing drug prescriptions prescrip-tions indiscriminately, as well as sexually harassing a woman patient and an employee. He lost his license in 1980 and promptly skipped to Florida, where he still had a license. He billed Medicare for about $15,000 in 1982 and 1983, and so far has received $9,200 from the government on those claims. Incidentally, this doctor also holds a license to practice in West Virginia. Another Michigan doctor lost his license in 1976 after state authorities charged him with performing sexual acts with his patients. He moved to Wyoming, and from 1980 through 1983 collected $4,500 in federal health payments. But last year, the doctor was indicted in a patient,' s death that was attributed to his prescription procedures. proce-dures. And just last month, Wyoming's licensing board revoked his license for endangering a patient. Fortunately, this character doesn't have a medical license in another state. CONRAIL SALE?: A big battle is shaping up over the administration's plan to sell the government-owned Conrail system back to some of the same people who engineered the railroad's collapse eight years ago. The prospective buyer is the Alleghany Corp. Several of the company's past or present directors were on the board of the old Penn Central Corp. It was Penn Central's collapse in 1976 that put the federal government into the rail business in the first place. Why does Alleghany want to buy Conrail? Because Conrail is making money at last after the taxpayers pumped some $7.5 billion into it. Conrail made a profit of $300 million last year and may make $500 million this year. Alleghany has offered $1 billion for the railroad. Actually, when tax breaks and other considerations are taken into account, the rail system will cost Alleghany only about half a billion dollars. In other words, Alleghany could make back its entire investment in one year. Rep. James Florio, D-N.J., is fighting hard to keep the government from selling the moneymaking railroadand rail-roadand certainly not at the bargain price Alleghany wants to pay. BOONDOGGLE OF THE WEEK: It wasn't too many years ago when 3 cents would send a first-class letter. Now it costs 20 cents, and the Postal Service will probably hike it to 25 cents in the next few years. But that's nothing compared to the Postal Service's great electronic communications communica-tions brainchild: INTELPOST. It's a super-duper way of sending a letter overseas by satellite, and the Postal Service spent $6 million to develop it. The trouble is, it costs $5 to send a single page. Result: In three years, the Postal Service has taken in only about $60,000 in INTELPOST business. HIGHER FOOD PRICES? : President Reagan would dearly love to have grocery prices stay down until the election, but Mother Nature and the president's own agricultural policy may combine to send meat and poultry prices climbing just before the crucial day. One reason is last summer's killer drought. Another is the administration's administra-tion's "Payment in Kind" program, which "paid" farmers in surplus grain for crops they didn't grow. The result is that feed grain supplies are dangerously dangerous-ly low. Copyright, 1984 United Feature Syndicate, Inc. |