May 29^th

Today we’ll look at Dr. Charles Krauthammer who is close to apoplexy over some new health care rules. He is incensed about the Electronic Healthcare Records (EHR) requirement; this interference with the doctor’s time costs the general practitioner as much as 48 minutes a day. Heavens, what a waste of time! (Note the weasel words, “as much as.” I guess the 48 minutes is the top time cost Krauthammer could find.) But when I moved from one town to another twenty years ago my regular physician gave me a copy of my records to take to my new physician…who promptly lost them. Eventually my new physician got what he needed but now, with EHR, your health records and all test results are available to any physician; an ER man who has to care for you after an auto accident or a heart attack will have all your health records right now!. But hey, a GP could see another couple of patients with that 48 minutes and so boost his gross by several hundred dollars a day. (But then it isn’t clear why typing notes into an electronic record system should be more complicated and take more time than hand written physician’s notes.) Krauthammer doesn’t explain; he just complains.

Krauthammer claims that EHR makes it easier to commit healthcare fraud but then one can cite contrary evidence: “Ann Arbor—Concerns that nationwide electronic health record adoption could lead to widespread fraudulent coding and billing practices that result in higher health care spending are unfounded, according to a study from the University of Michigan Schools of Information and Public Health and the Harvard School of Public Health” or “… EHRs appear to be making it harder to get away with fraud.” This is from “Fortune,” which is hardly a cozy liberal journal.

There is still plenty of fraud by physicians and none of that seems to concern Krauthammer: consider a 97 million dollar fraudulent program run by two M.D.s who referred patients to very expensive Partial Hospitalization Programs and got very rich for a short time through kickbacks. Then there was Dr. Robert Glazer who nicked the government for 33 million dollars from 2006 to 2014. How about 19 million for fraudulent home visits. The big one here is the physician who misdiagnosed cancer in patients so he could prescribe chemotherapy and expensive brain scans to see how his patients were doing. Dr. Farid Fata made about 35 million until the Feds caught up with him (Those awful interfering Federal authorities!) In his case a new nurse watched what he was doing for about ninety minutes, was disgusted and quit. She turned him in to Michigan State authorities in 2010. The state said he was doing nothing wrong and so he continued the scam until 2014 when the federal government finally caught up with him. The nurse was delighted.

Krauthammer says nothing about things like this and the reason is obvious; some physicians are overcome with greed even risking the health of those they are sworn to serve if doing so will make them money; then, in this instance, the clear inadequacy of state government to correct the problem required a federal intervention, a federal intervention that Dr. Krauthammer clearly despises.