Federal authorities are cracking down on cardiac biomarker laboratories that they allege paid doctors kickbacks to provide patients' blood samples for testing. Health Diagnostic Laboratory Inc. and Singulex Inc. agreed to pay at least $47 million and $1.5 million, respectively, to settle civil allegations filed by the Justice Department that they paid doctors for patient blood and billed Medicare for medically unnecessary testing. The Justice Department also joined whistleblower lawsuits againstTonya Mallory, HDL's former chief executive officer, and BlueWave Healthcare Consultants Inc. of Hanceville, Ala., an outside contractor that marketed HDL and Singulex's blood tests to doctors. [Subscription Required]
A California bill that would allow students to opt out of mandatory school vaccinations only if they have a medical condition that justifies an exemption is one step closer to becoming law, though it still has a long way to go. The bill was introduced in the California Senate in response to a measles outbreak at Disneyland in late December that's now linked to almost 150 infections. Among several hundred supporters and protesters outside the Capitol building in Sacramento on Wednesday, the bill sparked a debate about individual rights and responsibilities.
A year after Americans recoiled at new revelations that sick veterans were getting sicker while languishing on waiting lists — and months after the Department of Veterans Affairs instituted major reforms — government data shows that the number of patients facing long waits at VA facilities has not dropped at all. No one expected that the VA mess could be fixed overnight. But the Associated Press has found that since last summer, the number of medical appointments delayed 30 to 90 days has largely stayed flat. The number of appointments that take longer than 90 days to complete has nearly doubled.
Unconscious and with furry yellow paws in the air, Otter was guided into the MRI machine. The 4-year-old Lab had been having increasingly severe episodes of back pain over months and a neurosurgeon wanted to confirm his suspicions about the cause. "You can see he has a huge protrusion," said Dr. Larry Gainsburg, pointing to computer images of a herniated disk taken on equipment in a basement at the Johns Hopkins University medical campus. "He'll need surgery." For the past few months, veterinarians from outside practices have been able to get advanced diagnostic scans and therapies for their animal patients — mainly dogs and cats, but also birds and other more exotic creatures — at the renowned medical school for humans.
Major fads usually start on the West Coast and travel East. But when it comes to major healthcare reform, it would be best to look to Massachusetts for a vision of what might be coming to the rest of the country.
Last week, Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban caused quite a stir on Twitter by suggesting that people, if they could afford it, get quarterly bloodwork to establish a baseline of their own health. A big failing of medicine, he wrote, is that "we wait till we are sick to have our blood tested and compare the results to 'comparable demographics.' " While that idea may seem logical, medical researchers have long cautioned that more testing is not a recipe for better health. I and others, including many doctors, countered Cuban's views, saying they could produce dangerous outcomes for patients.