COLLOIDAL MINERALS

NEWS ARTICLE

Lining docs' pockets

USA TODAY believes that doctors should swear off owning treatment centers.

If you go to a doctor, you want him to think of you as a patient, not a cash cow.

But two studies in this month's New England Journal of Medicine show that some doctors are out to milk you dry.

They do it by sending patients to get unnecessary tests and treatment at clinics in which they have a financial stake.

An analysis of 6,581 workers' compensation cases in California, for example, found that:

>Doctors with money in physical therapy centers were twice as likely as other doctors to order patients to get physical therapy.

>While doctors generally order psychological tests of patients who complain of job stress, the bills for treatment averaged $672 more if doctors had investments in such clinics.

>Doctors using imaging centers they invested in ordered unnecessary MRI scans more often than other doctors did did.

A similar study of doctor-owned treatment centers in Florida found much the same thing.

What it all adds up to is billions of dollars and millions of hours of waste.

A new federal law this year protects taxpayers by barring the practice of physician referral of Medicare and Medicaid patients to labs that the doctor owns.

Private patients and their insurers need similar protection.

At a minimum, the American Medical Association should renew an ethics statement condemning such conflict of interest that it withdrew last year.

Better yet, the Clinton administration should embrace President Bush's proposal to bar this as a form of medical malpractice.

Doctors should see their patients as people, not dollar signs.

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