McKesson Corp. will pay $151 million to 29 states and the District of Columbia to settle a lawsuit alleging the company inflated prices of hundreds of prescription drugs, causing state Medicaid programs to overpay millions of dollars in reimbursements, officials said Friday. The agreement with San Francisco-based McKesson, one of the country's largest drug wholesalers, settles allegations the company deliberately inflated drug prices by as much as 25 percent from 2001 to 2009. An investigation by state and federal agencies found that McKesson overbilled for more than 1,400 brand-name drugs from 2001 to 2009.
Long before the University of Miami announced in May that its Miller School of Medicine had financial problems big enough to force layoffs of about 900 full-time and part-time workers, there were signs of serious trouble. As far back as October, billionaire car dealer Norman Braman wrote in a memo to fellow UM trustees that he and colleagues had been receiving anonymous letters for months "outlining a host of wrongdoings, mostly at the medical school." Braman and others closely tied to the school warned UM officials the medical school was spending too much, too fast in the push to build a world-class medical center.
Sabrina Seelig seemed too young to die. She arrived by ambulance at Wyckoff Heights Medical Center, long regarded as one of the most troubled hospitals in the city, at 11:05 a.m. on May 30, 2007, conscious and alert but complaining of vomiting and dizziness. She was given a sedative that put her into a deep sleep, and her wrists were tied to the bed. Ms. Seelig's case brings to mind the death of Libby Zion, an 18-year-old Bennington College freshman who died in 1984, eight hours after being admitted to New York Hospital, where she had been sedated and tied down. Ms. Zion's death led to changes in the training of young doctors across the country.
About 80 malpractice claims that forced an Alamogordo hospital to seek bankruptcy court protection last summer have been settled for more than $33 million. The Albuquerque Journal reports that that settlement lets the Gerald Champion Regional Medical Center, the largest hospital in Otero County, to emerge from bankruptcy protection. Dr. Christian Schlicht, an anesthesiologist and pain management specialist, is accused of using fraudulent credentials to operate on patients even though he wasn't a surgeon and injected the cement into patients' spines in a procedure that turned out to be neither safe nor effective.
Of the 15 doctors working full-time at Louisiana state prisons, nearly two-thirds have been disciplined by the state medical board for issues ranging from pedophilia to substance abuse to dealing methamphetamines. Louisiana state prisons appear to be dumping grounds for doctors who are unable to find employment elsewhere because of their checkered pasts, raising troubling moral questions as well as the specter of an accident waiting to happen. About 60 percent of the state's prison doctors have disciplinary records, compared with 2 percent of the state's 16,000 or so licensed medical doctors, according to data from the Louisiana State Board of Medical Examiners.
The tangle of wires and lines a patient in an intensive care unit can be tethered to has long been a frustration for nurses. For years, engineers at GE Healthcare and its competitors have envisioned using wireless technology to do just that. The obstacle hasn't been the technology. It has been getting dedicated space on the wireless spectrum. That happened this May when the Federal Communications Commission allocated a sliver of the spectrum for wireless sensors. Life Care Solutions, a unit of GE Healthcare based in Milwaukee, has pushed for the allocation for more than five years. The decision clears the way for what the industry is calling medical body area networks, or MBANs.