Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) and Ranking Member Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) today released a Finance Committee report detailing the case of a doctor who reportedly implanted nearly 600 potentially medically unnecessary stents from 2007 through mid-2009 at St. Joseph Medical Center in Towson, Maryland, and his relationship with the manufacturer of the stents, Abbott Labs. The Senators’ report found that the questionable stent implantations cost the Medicare program $3.8 million during that period.
“Hospital patients expect their care to be based on medical need, not profits. This report sets forth alarming evidence that patients at St. Joseph Medical Center received unnecessary and potentially harmful stent implants time and again – a pattern that is shocking, disturbing and shameful. Doctors should not be performing invasive medical procedures patients don’t need, and taxpayers certainly shouldn’t be paying for these wasteful and improper implantations,” said Baucus. “Even more disconcerting is that this could be a sign of a larger national trend of wasteful medical device use, which is why we included aggressive new tools in the new health care law to fight fraud, waste and abuse. The health care law improves screening of medical providers and increases oversight to root out fraud, waste and abuse like this, shining a spotlight on problems like these and helping ensure cases like this don’t happen again.”
From fiscal year 2004 to fiscal year 2009, the Medicare Part A program paid an estimated $25.7 billion for cardiac stent procedures and approximately $108.9 billion for 6.9 million procedures related to medical devices. Fraud, waste and abuse in the health care system cost Americans at least $60 billion a year – three percent of total health care spending. Other similar cases of apparently improper cardiac procedures have been uncovered at medical facilities across the country. Baucus and Grassley launched their review of this case to look for patterns that might have implications for preventing waste, fraud and abuse in Medicare and Medicaid.
Hundreds of patients have since filed claims they received unnecessary implants. Some doctors say the case has revealed a level of inappropriate care that is more common than most patients know.
Last month, the hospital where the (unnecessary) procedures were performed agreed to pay a $22 million fine to settle charges that it paid illegal kickbacks to the cardiologist in exchange for patient referrals, denying any wrong doing. Similar cases are being prosecuted in Texas and Louisiana.
Dr. Steven Nissen, chief of cardiovascular medicine at the Cleveland Clinic, who routinely treats patients who have been given multiple unneeded stents: “What was going on in Baltimore is going on right now in every city in America. We’re spending a fortune as a country on procedures that people don’t need.”
Stents should be used only if X-rays show that most of the artery is blocked, and the patient has symptoms like frequent chest pain. Stent procedures can, in rare cases, cause bleeding, stroke or a heart attack. Once a stent is placed, it can result in a life-threatening clot that emerges weeks to months later. Stent patients must spend a year or more taking blood-thinning medications, which have their own risks.
From:
- Baucus, Grassley Outline Millions of Wasted Taxpayer Dollars, Examine Reports Of Hundreds of Improper Cardiac Stent Implantations, US Senate Commitee on Finance, December 06, 2010
- Doctor Faces Suits Over Cardiac Stents, Gardiner Harris, NYTimes, December 5, 2010
- Abbott finds "potential fraud, waste, and abuse", Shelley Wood, Heartwire, December 6, 2010
After the recent vile remarks by a certain talk-show host about women’s sexual and reproductive health, today a Ohio legislator introduced legislation to demand equal treatment of a man’s reproductive health: Viagra and the little blue bill of Ohio.
ScienceDaily, 02/01/2012
A new study finds a potential link between daily consumption of diet soft drinks and the risk of vascular events. Individuals who drink diet soft drinks on a daily basis may be at increased risk of suffering vascular events such as stroke, heart attack, and vascular death.
Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the leading cause of death, responsible for over 800.000 death/year in the US.
The major Risk Factors for CVD and Coronary Artery Disease (CAD) are similar for both men and women, with several additional risk factors for women associated with pregnancy and polycystic ovaries:
A poor diet is responsible for a number of chronic illnesses such as high cholesterol, obesity, hypertension, and diabetes, resulting in as much as 75% of the cost of medical care in the United States.
World-famous musician and singer Barry Manilow is one of the more than 2.5 million Americans living with Atrial fibrillation (AF, or AFib), a disease that causes your heart to race and beat out of rhythm, and make it hard to pump blood efficiently to your body.
People without heart disease should think twice before taking cholesterol-lowering statins. In a review of the medical literature, researchers found the drugs did appear to slash deaths ever so slightly in patients at low risk of heart disease. But many of the reports they looked at -- all but one funded by drug makers -- were flawed.
Ivabradine, a “sinus node inhibitor”, is now marketed in 27 European countries for the symptomatic treatment of chronic stable angina pectoris in patients with normal sinus rhythm who have a contraindication or intolerance to beta-blockers.
Former President Bill Clinton has become a vegetarian and now weighs again what he did in high school, and was recently named PETA's 2010 Person of the Year.
Excessive weight affects virtually every organ system in the body, increasing the risk of diabetes, myocardial infarction, troke, cancer, sleep apnea, osteoarthritis, and other chronic diseases.
Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) and Ranking Member Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) today released a Finance Committee report detailing the case of a doctor who reportedly implanted nearly 600 potentially medically unnecessary stents from 2007 through mid-2009 at St. Joseph Medical Center in Towson, Maryland, and his relationship with the manufacturer of the stents, Abbott Labs. The Senators’ report found that the questionable stent implantations cost the Medicare program $3.8 million during that period.
Rahm Emanuel said today city workers should take better care of themselves -- with City Hall's help -- as one way to save taxpayers money by reducing health care costs.
A September 20, 2010, NYTimes article describes inaccurate outcomes with a point based tool to calculate your chances of developing coronary artery disease & stroke over the next 10 years. The simplified system was developed so doctors and patients would not need a computer. Each risk factor corresponds to a number of points; the more points you have, the higher your risk.
LONDON - Stroke patients over 70 who get stents to keep their arteries open may be doubling their risk of having another stroke or dying compared to patients who get surgery instead, a new study says.
Decreased Oxygen blood levels in the brain during heart surgery correlates to increased risk of suffering from the mental impairment dubbed "pump head".
May 21, 2010
A non-invasive and much cheaper test for coronary disease is available when a diagnosis of CAD is uncertain. Until recently, CT Coronary Angiography (CTCA) could not adequately identify coronary artery blockages. While not accurate enough to provide a pathway necessary to identify and treat these lesions, it avoids the risks and high costs of cardiac catherization, an important benefit. CTCA is most useful in patients with moderate risk for coronary artery disease.
Losing weight is difficult, and keeping it off may be even harder. In a study, published in the March 24 issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association, middle aged women of normal weight needed at least an hour of moderate exercise a day to prevent gaining more than five pounds over a three-year period.
In a study, published on-line in the journal Circulation on April 13, 2010, cardiologists were asked under what circumstances they would order a cardiac catheterization. 29% of physicians ordered the test for other than clinical reasons, foremost amongst them malpractice concerns. About 25% of the doctors ordered more tests than were necessary, driving up costs. Others did it because of concerns of what competing colleagues would do in similar circumstances. The cardiologists indicated they rarely ordered a cardiac catheterization for financial reasons.
In a February 11, 2010 article published in the Wall Street Journal the excessive use of coronary artery stents was exposed. The COURAGE study, published in 2007, argued that 1 million PCI procedures are performed each year, with at least 30% being performed in stable CAD patients. Based on the COURAGE trial results, 300,000 of these procedures could be deferred.
Calculate the cost of your Healthcare under the new Healthcare Reform Bill
This link from The Kaiser Family Foundation calculates the costs for persons aged 19-64 who have to buy their own health insurance. As a drawback of this calculator it doesn't compare with costs under the previous system.
http://healthreform.kff.org/Subsidycalculator.aspx?CFID=23012004&CFTOKEN=77740642&jsessionid=6030617e4563721fa11313c7d5a7c756271b
To Kristen Mack, The Chicago Tribune, December 20, 2010
(The Chicago Tribune today released a Rahm Emanuel statement in which he promises to reduce City workers' health care costs by $500M, or 20%, with "... just 4 percent of the city’s workforce accounting for roughly 65 percent of the city’s health care costs...")
The new Healthcare Bill
With the passage of this new Health Care Reform Bill, do you think that the pros outnumber the cons?
Obama explained in its signing ceremony at the White House that “this legislation is not going to repair every thing that ails our health care system, but it moves us decisively in the proper course.
Will this $940 billion new Health Care Reform Bill be advantageous for the the vast majority of People in America? Let’s look at a number of the facts as we try to clarify the benefits and drawbacks of this new Health Care Reform Bill:
Testosterone supplementation has been shown to increase muscle mass and strength in healthy older men. However, a new study, reported in the New England Journal of Medicine 1), showed that in older men (>74 yo), testosterone treatment was associated with an significantly higher rate of cardiovascular adverse events.
