Have you noticed the one aspect of the Health Care Reform conundrum that goes consistently unmentioned? That is the off-the-chart volume of physician misbehavior in America, and its impact on the entire model we call medicine.
Consider this, for a moment: In the year just past, 2,490 doctors found themselves either convicted of serious crimes or facing civil penalties, due to extraordinary bad judgment. The National Practitioner Data Bank holds records on 237,000 MDs who are referred to by the Health Research Group as either "Dangerous" or "Questionable." Now, are there doctors on that list who shouldn't be there? I have no doubt. But for any MD unfairly sanctioned, research shows there are another dozen who were not reported, but should have been. And we aren't talking “medical errors" here. We're talking flat-out, egotistical entitlement.
The U.S. Department of Justice reports that law enforcement agencies spend $500 Billion a year coping with medical fraud. I would love for someone to explain how that money couldn't be better spent. Over the past decade, more than 1,000 physicians have been convicted of some type of insurance fraud. We have 5,700 public hospitals in the U.S., and half of them are being monitored for miscoding violations. We have a medical system where more than 80 physicians have been convicted of performing unnecessary surgeries to the tune of Billions, in the last 10-years alone. Now, I'm no fan of Insurance as it is managed today, but if I were CEO of one of them, I'd damn sure do everything I could to protect my stockholders from the rape & pillage of the ungodly amount of "lab coat greed.”
The result? The decent physicians in this country are forced to cope with the distortions in the system caused by a fraction of their peers over 7 decades. I find that unfortunate, except for the fact that - in study after study - doctors who respond to surveys say that while they witness lack of ethics and incompetency by their peers, they almost NEVER report it. I would say that fuels a self-perpetuating cycle that none of us are happy with.
Health Care Reform? Now there's a complex subject. But here's a novel thought: Why not just start by weeding out the criminals, and demand state medical boards NOT re-license them after crimes such as Medicare Fraud, secretly filming nude patients, rape, child molestation, 400 unnecessary surgeries and murder?
Monday, January 25, 2010
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