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Six Detroit area doctors indicted in $500M health care fraud

fox2detroit.com

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Re: Six Detroit area doctors indicted in $500M health care fraud

#31

Post by youeseh »

CaliforniaKarl wrote: post #3

Ugh. I’m going on for surgery next Thursday, for a laparoscopic partial colon resection, and one of the things I’m most worried about will be post-surgery pain killers. Hearing stories about excessive pain killer use and prescription really make me want to avoid them, but on the other hand I’ll need to be up & moving around ASAP to speed my recovery, and pain would get in the way of that.

I have family that was on opium based pain killers after surgery. Their description was to the effect of, "that is some goood shit". Upon recovery, they stopped taking it. I suppose they no longer had holes in their life that needed filling with a pain killer, literally and figuratively, and knowing that made it easier to not become dependent.

Re: Six Detroit area doctors indicted in $500M health care fraud

#32

Post by pstuart »

refurb wrote: post #28
pstuart wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crazier still is that kratom is getting lined up to be scheduled as well, when it is a proven safe tool for weaning people off of opiates.

It will be interesting to see if they finally make kratom schedule 1. When they tried it last time, the public outcry was enough to stop it. And I agree it would be awful if they did. Kratom is certainly not without addiction risk, but if you believe in harm reduction, it’s far better to have people taking it versus prescription opioids or heroin.

Apparently the current FDA head has financial interests in doing the wrong thing: https://www.reddit.com/r/kratom/comments/7et2l8/fda_loyalty_...

disclaimer: yes, it's a reddit post but it seems to capture the essence of the situation and I'm too lazy for other citations at the moment.

Re: Six Detroit area doctors indicted in $500M health care fraud

#33

Post by umichguy »

whalesalad wrote: post #20

Bloomfield Hills and Birmingham... doesn't surprise me. This isn't really fair to associate with Detroit either. These are suburbs 30+ minutes outside of the city.

I went to West Bloomfield high and lived in the area for while. And agree with you.

Re: Six Detroit area doctors indicted in $500M health care fraud

#34

Post by HillaryBriss »

danans wrote: post #14

If true, $500M of fraud (over only 5 years!) is hard to fathom considering it is a small clinic. I'm wondering how it wasn't discovered before it got to this level. You'd think that even $100M would have set off alarms somewhere.

interesting that only about $10 million was fraudulently billed to a private company (blue cross/blue shield), and pretty much all the rest was billed to state and federal governments.

maybe this is reading too much into it, but might this be evidence that government health care funds are poorly managed and pay out too much, too often, asking too few questions in the process?

Re: Six Detroit area doctors indicted in $500M health care fraud

#35

Post by coding123 »

danans wrote: post #14

If true, $500M of fraud (over only 5 years!) is hard to fathom considering it is a small clinic. I'm wondering how it wasn't discovered before it got to this level. You'd think that even $100M would have set off alarms somewhere.

I recall a few years back on some radio show probably OPB they just started recently to aggregate and chart all of the billing codes from every doctor in the nation, specifically related to medicare billing. It was at that point that they just started to find fraud. So this is a new thing that they can do, and I guess this is one of the outcomes.

I can't wait for them to do this to the military black budget one day.

Re: Six Detroit area doctors indicted in $500M health care fraud

#37

Post by onetimemanytime »

youeseh wrote: post #31
CaliforniaKarl wrote: post #3

Ugh. I’m going on for surgery next Thursday, for a laparoscopic partial colon resection, and one of the things I’m most worried about will be post-surgery pain killers. Hearing stories about excessive pain killer use and prescription really make me want to avoid them, but on the other hand I’ll need to be up & moving around ASAP to speed my recovery, and pain would get in the way of that.

I have family that was on opium based pain killers after surgery. Their description was to the effect of, "that is some goood shit". Upon recovery, they stopped taking it. I suppose they no longer had holes in their life that needed filling with a pain killer, literally and figuratively, and knowing that made it easier to not become dependent.

Probably depends on the person, some might get addicted after a cigarette, others not even after 10 packs. But that person might get addicted to alcohol.

Either way, after an operation might as well suck it up a bit, like they did before Oxy and the likes came.

Re: Six Detroit area doctors indicted in $500M health care fraud

#38

Post by siculars »

mgkimsal wrote: post #17
akamel wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Use them only when you need them. I was really annoyed when my wife’s doctor freely prescribed her oxi after her delivery even though my wife never asked for it and never showed any sign of needing it. Having free flowing prescriptions is how we end up with so many addicts.

and then... for legitimate cases... no dice. about 7 years ago my wife got sand in her eye - was problematic enough that we went to a local clinic. she wasn't going to go blind, but it was irritated enough that after flushing it out, it still looked... bad. and she indicated it was a bit sore, that she wanted to get home to just try to get to sleep. The doctor there offered a prescription for percocet. We said "no, n…

The key phrase here is "a few years later". Much has changed in this area of medicine over the last few years...

Re: Six Detroit area doctors indicted in $500M health care fraud

#40

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

mindslight wrote: post #8

> "The damage that opioid distribution has done to our community and to the United States as a whole has been devastating" said U.S. Attorney Schneider I guess scapegoat big pharma is successfully finding their own scapegoats! The feds could straightforwardly address the fentanyl problem by deillegalizing opiods, allowing reputable distribution to take over. And then society could maturely deal with addiction as a pe…

> The feds could straightforwardly address the fentanyl problem by deillegalizing opiods, allowing reputable distribution to take over. And then society could maturely deal with addiction as a personal medical problem.

I don't understand this at all. Most opioids are legal prescription drugs. The problem is that they are highly addictive, so despite trying deal with addition as a "personal medical problem", which is how many opioid addicts are treated in the US, it still results in a huge increase in dead people.

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