Over-Regulation Has Criminalized the Practice of Medicine

This criminalization of everyday life is not just insanely costly and insanely counter-productive–it’s insanely punitive.
The average person has little exposure to the criminalization of everyday enterprise in America via over-regulation and outsized penalties for even accidental violations of rules and regulations. One field that continues to be burdened with excessive/counter-productive regulations and outsized penalties is the practice of medicine. I received the following email from a physician correspondent: “As you will see, physicians have to deal with the federal government’s increasingly crazy and copious rules (like which patients they can screen for disease and how often). The following is an email ad I received for an expensive service that provides no benefit to the ill and injured of America. It’s bureaucratic nonsense.” Here is the email ad: Can you afford a $1.1 million penalty and a 50-year exclusion from Medicare? That’s what one New Jersey provider is facing. And he’s not alone. In the last couple of months a facility in Utah is now under a 30-year exclusion, and a New York physician is now excluded from Medicare for five years. These penalties and exclusions not only affect those providers that are intentionally fraudulent. Even an innocent mistake can land you in serious legal and financial hot water. Being tagged as “excluded” by the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) can crush your practice — especially considering the new guidelines that went into effect just a couple of days ago (on Feb. 13th).

This post was published at Charles Hugh Smith on MONDAY, FEBRUARY 20, 2017.