Federal program keeps paying physicians found incompetent or unethical.
Physicians who land in hot water with state regulators have a helping hand when it comes to keeping their practices running:
The federal government.
At least 216 remained on Medicare payment rolls in 2015 despite surrendering a license, having one revoked, or being excluded from state-paid healthcare rolls in the previous five years, a MedPage Today/Milwaukee Journal Sentinel investigation found. In all, they were paid $25.8 million by taxpayers in 2015 alone.
Among them: Glen Marin, DO, from New York City.
According to New York Department of Health disciplinary records, Marin didn't contest charges that he was sexually inappropriate with a female patient. In California, as a result, he surrendered his license rather than go through a full disciplinary hearing.
He was allowed to keep practicing in New York, but only if he had a chaperone present when he met with female patients.
Since 2007, Marin settled at least three separate malpractice cases, according to TruthMD, including one for failing to diagnose the cancer that eventually killed a patient.
Despite that, taxpayers helped foot the bill for him to keep practicing medicine. In 2015, the year after he surrendered his California license, he was paid more than $280,000 through Medicare.
Other individual physicians who faced serious sanctions were paid as much as $1.4 million that year.
The analysis focused on 2015 because that is the last year for which payment details from the annual $720-billion Medicare program are available.