The attacks on pain management doctors are far from over. Don’t let the Ruan/Kahn decision make you think pain management is now safe to practice.  The government will still attack us, coming up with some other way to do it.  Healthcare fraud is the big ticket.  You should see, over the last couple of years that they have already been planning on this approach, as more pain management practices have had healthcare fraud charges added to the Controlled Substance Act charges.  Here is a recent case that was settled without trial in Maryland:    Gonzaga Interventional Pain Management

Notice that the practice is owned by a minority physician practicing in a rural community with lots of government insured patients.  Dr. Gonzaga was charged with false claims for urine drug tests that were not medically necessary, according to the government.  The government makes a lot of money doing this. Here’s how:

Medical offices bill for much larger amounts than they receive, even from private insurance. I’m not exactly sure why they do that, and it needs to change, because the people most affected are the uninsured that have to pay the full amount. Naturally they don’t need to lose income by charging less than what insurance will pay, but I’ve seen some practices that charge $500 for a procedure they get paid $130 for.  The government pays a fraction of the charge, often less than 10%.  But when they charge the doctor with fraud, they charge him what he billed, not what he received. So when they win the case (and in court they usually do), they recoup up to 10x what the doctor actually received. What this means for doctors treating government insured patients is that they work their entire career treating Medicare/Medicaid patients for free. And now that the government is in cahoots with private insurances like Blue Cross and Aetna, it even works for those patients.

Here’s another problem we are facing. In order to find doctors to target, the government is now using the PDMPs (prescription drug monitoring programs that were originally designed to be available only with criminal activity and only to law enforcement) whose data is now been given to private companies which then crunch the data into charts to identify the doctor to target.  Here’s an example of data—not of this physician, but another that we got through a FOIA request:

There is no way to stop these attacks except to get the CSA (Controlled Substance Act) repealed. That is the agenda of Doctorsofcourage.  Anything else is a waste of time.  Get behind and support what will work, or the profession of medicine will soon be destroyed.