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Sunday, March 30, 2003A prominent University of Washington kidney specialist pleaded guilty yesterday to a felony charge of submitting a fraudulent health-care bill but vowed he would not give up his position on the UW medical-school faculty. That's right, felony charges, as in robbing-a-bank-type charges. His crime: Couser pleaded to one count of mail fraud for submitting a $124 bill to a private health insurer in 1996 for a dialysis treatment at which he wasn't present. His plea came in the fourth year of a Justice Department criminal investigation of Medicare and Medicaid billing practices at the UW medical school. Couser also admitted that from September 1991 to last April he submitted $100,000 in bills to Medicare, Medicaid and a U.S. Defense Department health-insurance program for dialysis treatments when he wasn't present. Now, I don't bill for dialysis, but I have to wonder about the justice of this. I often walk past our hospital's dialysis department, and there aren't any nephrologists hanging out in there while their patients get dialysis. Yet, those nephrologists are responsible for writing the correct orders for that dialysis and for handling anything that may go wrong. They don't have to be physically present to have it administered, but it is their professional expertise that makes it possible. Shouldn't they be able to bill for that? posted by Sydney on 3/30/2003 08:04:00 AM 0 comments 0 Comments: |
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