The story about UT Southwestern's VIP Program broke in 2007. Apparently, the "special patient" featured in the deposition linked below, was so special that former President Wildenthal showed up at her house on the day of her death and went through her personal belongings to, he said, be of help.
For those who want to look at this issue more deeply, the article linked below, in turn, contains links to background material. Oh, what a tangled web we weave. . . .
Three years ago, Steve Haffner briefly gained notoriety when he leeked [sic] a meta-analysis of GlaxoSmithKline’s Avandia diabetes that was to be published in The New England Journal of Medicine. At the time, Haffner served as a peer reviewer and the breach allowed the drugmaker to respond very quickly to publication. But a recent US Senate Finance Committee investigation shows his ties to Glaxo were complicated - he was the lead author on an Avandia paper that was apparently ghostwritten before appearing in Circulation. . . .
McAllen, Texas, has the second-highest medical costs in the country, behind only Miami. Fraud on the part of caregivers drives up the cost immeasurably. Here's another late-breaking round of arrests from that unfortunate region. See the Zemanta box below for a few more examples. Incidents involving lawmakers and those who enforce the law are particularly troubling.
FBI agents arrested the 38-year-old lawmaker Thursday morning on charges of accepting illegal kickbacks for referring patients to a McAllen oral surgeon, a violation of the federally funded health care program’s rules.
Prosecutors allege she took money from Gary Morgan Schwarz, owner of Valley Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery center in McAllen, between August and November 2008 for patients sent his way.
Agents arrested Schwarz and two other dentists –- Willis David Egger, of McAllen, and Reynaldo Casares, of La Joya -- Tuesday for their alleged involvement in the scheme.
In the latest effort to break up the often cozy relationship between doctors and the medical industry, the University of Michigan Medical School has become the first to decide that it will no longer take any money from drug and device makers to pay for coursework doctors need to renew their medical licenses.
Some say the incident in which the director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) assured the University of Miami’s medical school dean if he hired Charles Nemeroff, MD the disgraced researcher, Nemeroff could still pull in government grants is an example of the Old Boy’s Network.
NIMH director Thomas Insel, MD assured Pascal Goldschmidt, MD, UM’s medical school dean that Nemeroff ’s Congressional investigation for unreported drug industry income and NIH’s termination of his $9 million grant shouldn’t stop the government funding spigot – even as Insel personally revised NIMH’s “conflict of interest” rules.
I missed this one when it came out a few days ago. UTMB is getting set to RIF 363 employees providing care to inmates at TDJC. I wonder if this guy will be one of them, or if merit has anything to do with it.
Dr. Walid Hamad Hamoudi was caught by state investigators writing prescriptions for 'pain management patients' that the state says were not medically necessary. Pain management prescriptions are a massive problem in Texas and other states, allowing doctors to make significant money on the side by signing prescriptions for those who are addicted the hydrocodone, Xanax and other pain pills. Dr. Hamoudi is a physician at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, which serves the Texas Department of Corrections prisons in the region.
UTMB is really managing to get itself some good press here. "Grits for Breakfast" is one of the top-ranked blogs in Texas. It specifically watches the Texas prison system.
The UT Medical Branch at Galveston, which provides health care at most Texas prison units, has been in the news recently for making a little money on the side. First it was a UTMB doc sanctioned for allegedly prescribing drugs to addicts outside his prison practice. Now we learn of UTMB's participation in a contract to train police officers to take blood following DWI stops by practicing on mentally ill inmates. KHOU published this statement from the medical school:
Every TDCJ inmate—even those who aren't sick enough to be sent to Jester IV—has blood drawn as part of the intake process. So why didn't UTMB ask mentally healthy inmates to consent to having these laymen stick needles in them? For that matter, why not ask free-world patients at UTMB-Galveston to allow the police to experiment on them?
Recruiting top-notch scientists to Texas has been difficult, Shine
said, because of a perception in the outside world that Texas is
unreceptive toward such science-related issues as evolution and climate
change.
Of course, this absolves UT and its component institutions of any blame whatsoever, doesn't it? Why, it's the fault of the citizens of Texas, according to this theory, not anything that UT's administrators have done. What a self-serving little theory.
An inconvenient truth concerning the global warming and evolution excuses, however, is that there is a little more to the story. UT has taken action against faculty that has gotten national attention. Perhaps the most visible of these actions involved the reduction in force the UT system sanctioned and the UTMB administration carried out against faculty in 2008, recently resulting in a censure from the AAUP. Utterly failing to involve faculty governance in the process except as window dressing toward the end, UTMB administration employed a stacked RIF selection committee and a stacked RIF appeals committee to carry out its agenda. On average, the selection committee, which included the Provost's neighbor and a disproportionate number of people from the Provost's former department before his promotion, had about eight minutes to consider the careers of faculty being considered for a cut. It is impossible to digest a substantial curriculum vita in only eight minutes, much less the volumes of other information that these faculty generated throughout their careers. Of course faculty names had been presented to the committee by chairs, who had largely already made the decisions.
As for the RIF appeals committee, it was uniformly staffed with management personnel who also held faculty appointments. (UTMB President David Callender holds a faculty appointment.) This committee only upheld about three appeals, and one successful appellant's contract was not renewed a month later, making the whole process meaningless for him.
Then there are the well-publicized cases in which UT has crushed dissent, such as Dr. Larry Gentilello's concerns that UT Southwestern was not in conformance with Medicare rules. He was the chair of a department until he made his concerns known to UT Southwestern management (not a third party), and suddenly found himself demoted and his pay cut. (More about UT Southwestern and its Medicare problems can be found on the blog UT Southwestern and Parkland Hospital Stories. (See additional stories concerning this in the Zemanta box below.) Dr. Gentilello's case is still under way and on appeal right now.
Click on the highlighted text to read about similar cases involving Dr. Robert Klebe of UTHSC San Antonio, and Dr. Naiel Nassar, yet another unfortunate instance occurring at UT Southwestern. Dr. Klebe's case is still ongoing with UT appealing to the Fifth Circuit in May after having lost two separate jury awards in favor of Doctor Klebe of $900,000 and $400,000, and UT has vowed to appeal Doctor Nasser's case after a jury awarded him $3.6 million dollars.
No, there's more than evolution and global warming going on here. UT needs to stop looking at Charles Darwin and Al Gore and start looking in the mirror for the root of its problems. Of course, all that hot air accompanying its excuses may well be contributing to global warming.
According to the OIG the reason the reason for the failure was, "These over-payments occurred because Parkland did not have procedures in place to ensure that units of drugs billed corresponded to units of drugs administered."
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