by Charles Ornstein and Tracy Weber
ProPublica
Excerpts:
The U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois filed a federal fraud lawsuit [1] today against a Chicago psychiatrist profiled by ProPublica [2] and the Chicago Tribune in 2009 for his voluminous prescribing of antipsychotic drugs to nursing home patients.
In a news release [3], the government says that Dr. Michael Reinstein“received illegal kickbacks from pharmaceutical companies and submitted at least 140,000 false claims to Medicare and Medicaid for antipsychotic medications he prescribed for thousands of mentally ill patients in area nursing homes.”
ProPublica and the Tribune reported [2] in 2009 that Reinstein prescribed more of the risky antipsychotic clozapine to patients in Illinois’Medicaid program in 2007 than all of the doctors in the Medicaid programs of Texas, Florida and North Carolina.
The government accuses Reinstein of billing Medicare and Medicaid for managing his patients’ medications, “knowing that he did not engage in substantive evaluations of his patients’ medical and psychiatric conditions to properly manage their medications,” the U.S. attorney’s office said in its release.“Instead, he allegedly prescribed medications to his patients based on his receipt of kickbacks from pharmaceutical companies.”
Read the Full Story Here: http://www.propublica.org/article/high-prescribing-chicago-psychiatrist-faces-federal-fraud-suit
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