Orthopedics & Sports Medicine

April 16, 2019

Telemarketing “free” back and limb braces for seniors adds up to a $1.2 billion Medicare fraud

Federal authorities have busted up what they say is a $1.2 billion Medicare fraud that should give taxpayers and patients pause about long-distance medical consultations and the huge sums of cash washing around the medical device industry.

Two dozen people, some of them doctors, have been charged in a complex ploy to gull seniors into asking about back, shoulder, wrist, and knee braces that were promoted as free on TV and radio ads nationwide. When the older adults called to inquire about the devices, they were transferred to telemarketing centers in the Philippines and Latin America.

In the far-away boiler rooms, trained operators extracted important personal information from callers, then connected them for “telemedicine” consultations with cooperating doctors. The MDs asked cursory questions before then prescribing the devices, whether needed or not. The orders were filled by select companies, which then would send out the braces and charge them to Medicare.

January 25, 2019

What’s prodding contact sports’ big shifts on head trauma? Insurance companies’ ‘panic’

by Patrick A. Malone

Parents and young athletes may have wrestled with the decision whether to play contact sports, as research shows the injuries that players can suffer from blows to the head. But lesser known parties to the games may be the undoing of professional and organized soccer, hockey, and football: Insurance companies.

The firms, which provide necessary and invaluable protections to players and organizations by spreading the financial risks of harms, have fled professional and amateur sports, declining to offer them coverages, even at high costs, Steve Fainaru and Mark Fainaru-Wada of ESPN’s Outside the Lines program reported.

Insurers are balking not only at providing liability policies but also worker compensation for pros, ESPN says. The dearth of coverage has hit hard the NFL, collegiate and Pop Warner programs, as well as football helmet makers. They’re forced to hunt far and wide for the few firms willing to assume sports risks — and they pay high and accordingly, if they can get policies.

January 4, 2019

Who didn’t see this coming? Patient anger grows over knee surgery hype

by Patrick A. Malone

With a graying nation projected to see millions of patients undergoing knee replacements each year at an annual cost to taxpayers running in the billions of dollars, it may be past time to ask if surgeons and hospitals promote and perform these popular procedures to excess.

Liz Szabo, in a story written for the nonprofit, nonpartisan Kaiser Health News Service (KHN) and published in the Washington Post, reported that knee surgeries have their “risks and limitations,” and “doctors are increasingly concerned that the procedure is overused and that its benefits have been oversold.”

As she wrote:

January 1, 2019

‘Bleed Out’ details how daunting the pursuit of justice can be for harmed patients

by Patrick A. Malone

When doctors, hospitals, insurers, and their captive lawmakers howl about how unfair malpractice lawsuits allegedly can be for modern medicine, patients who have suffered harms while seeking medical services should require loved ones, friends, and members of their community to view Bleed Out.

This new HBO documentary details the decade-long quest by comedian Steve Burrows and his family for justice for his mother, Judie. She was an energetic, retired teacher when she fell from her bike and needed emergency hip surgery. Before she had recovered, she fell again and needed a second operation. But this time, something went wrong: She lost more than half her blood, fell into a coma, and suffered irreversible brain damage that meant that she would spend the rest of her life in institutional care in rural Wisconsin.

September 14, 2018

Common sense on kids and concussions, adult heart disease, frats and booze

by Patrick A. Malone

Common sense and moderation can matter a ton in maintaining good health, as recent news reports show, particularly with kids and concussions, middle-aged adults and heart disease, and collegiate alcohol abuse.

With youngsters returning to school and so many of them participating in sports and recreation programs, it’s good that the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has issued evidence-based guidance on protecting kids who suffer mild traumatic brain injury or what most of us would call concussions.

These injuries have become a growing concern for parents and young athletes. Sports leagues and sporting groups are coming to a time of reckoning with just how harmful head trauma can be.

September 11, 2018

With a knee you can see: Yes, Obamacare helps to cut costs and improve care

by Patrick A. Malone

Federal regulators may be forced to reconsider their plans to curtail a cost-containing experiment that affects some of the most commonly performed surgeries — knee and hip replacement procedures that hundreds of thousands of seniors undergo annually through their Medicare coverage at a cost to taxpayers of billions of dollars.

Under the Affordable Care Act, doctors and hospitals were pushed to adopt a new and different way to think about and to bill for these surgeries, which, by the way, aren’t risk free. Instead of patients getting flooded with bills from each provider involved — the lab, radiologist, anesthesiologist, surgeon, hospital, and so forth — Obamacare got all the parties together and told them they would get a single, “bundled payment.” Hospitals, typically, then acted as the chief point of contact, getting the providers to figure their fair share, billing patients (once), and collecting reimbursements and distributing them appropriately.

The system seemed to work: costs declined, the quality of care went up, and patients expressed relief that their mailboxes weren’t jammed with a blizzard of the usual incomprehensible medical bills. But doctors, hospitals, and insurers kept grumbling. The Trump Administration and Republicans in Congress, as part of their relentless and counter-factual assault on the ACA (more on that in a second), took aim at bundled payments and talked about changing and eliminating this approach.

September 6, 2018

As 2018 season kicks off, college football reckons with head trauma harms

by Patrick A. Malone

College football has kicked off its fall season with a flourish, but the signs are increasing that concerns about players’ health and safety may slash at the game’s size, spectacle, and importance.

Just as the pro leagues were forced to answer in court for the harms that athletes suffer due to repeated blows to their heads, the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) has been hit with claims in the civil justice system, asserting wrongful deaths of players from the recent past.

Lawsuits, believed to be part of what will be a wave, were filed against the college sports conference on behalf of the survivors and estates of a onetime University of Southern California fullback and a University of California at Los Angeles running back.

August 21, 2018

Maryland tragedy underscores need for tough safeguards for players’ health

by Patrick A. Malone

In College Park, Md., new cooling tents have sprouted on the University of Maryland’s football practice field, where the training staff also is taking pains now to provide adequate cold drinks and breaks to players. Observers say the pre-season regimens, however, are not only marked by greater attentiveness to the young athletes’ needs, they’re also eerily quiet and somber.

That’s because top Terps leaders have apologized and conceded the school shares blame for the tragic and preventable heat stroke death of Jordan McNair, 19, a Maryland offensive lineman. Coaches forced the young man to run and over-exert himself during a May 29 practice. More importantly, they failed to diagnose the severity of his condition, neglecting to so much as take his pulse and blood pressure, and, in a disputed account, not noticing that he was suffering seizures, or acting fast to drop his body temperature with ice and cooling baths.

Published reports suggest he showed heatstroke signs before 5 that afternoon, though trainers did not call for emergency help and an ambulance until nearly 6, when his body temperature may have hit 106 degrees. He was admitted to a hospital, where nurses and doctors immersed him in a cooling bath and reduced his temperature to 102 degrees — 90 minutes or so after he apparently got into distress.

August 15, 2018

NFL settlements raise new questions on head trauma and Parkinson’s and ALS

by Patrick A. Malone

The National Football League, which long has resisted the growing reality that game-related head blows can cause major harms to its players, may be providing yet new and unintended warnings about the sustained damages of concussions.

The Los Angeles Times reported that pro football’s pay-outs, as part of its billion-dollar head-injuries settlement with NFL players and their union, have been surprisingly high in cases where retirees have claimed damages due to Parkinson’s and ALS.

Parkinson’s, the newspaper noted, is a “progressive movement disorder that produces tremors, impaired movement, and slurred speech.” It is “marked by the buildup of proteins called Lewy bodies in brain cells.” ALS, also known as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or Lou Gehrig’s disease, is a condition affecting “nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord and ultimately results in a fatal inability to initiate and control muscle movement.”

August 6, 2018

As Big Pharma rivals battled to hype opioids, watchdogs dozed. They slumber still.

by Patrick A. Malone

When Big Pharma pursues rapacious profits and regulators snooze, patients suffer terrible consequences, as new revelations about the opioid crisis show.

Kaiser Health News Service , via the Washington Post, and The New York Times both have done excellent investigative digging into drug makers’ role in fueling the prescription painkiller mess that authorities estimate claims 116 lives a day due to overdoses.

Fred Schulte, writing for the independent, nonpartisan Kaiser service, reported that rival makers — seeing how much money Purdue Pharma was making with its powerful and addictive OxyContin drug and that it was encountering law enforcement and regulatory challenges — stepped in with “similarly dangerous painkillers, such as fentanyl, morphine and methadone.”