According to stories in Washington's Peninsula Daily News and Port Townsend Leader on December 21, agents from a variety of federal, state and local law enforcement agencies invaded the home and office of physician James Kimber Rotchford, MD, disrupting his practice, which subsequently reopened. Rotchford is immediate past president of Washington Society of Addiction Medicine and supported my own campaign against unscheduled buprenorphine practice audits by DEA. He appears below in a brief interview about his pain treatment practice.
This appears to be yet another example of disregard for patients and physicians when inept and ham-fisted law enforcement authorities invade medical practices. In their defense of course we must acknowledge that real fraud happens and must be stopped. Is the only way out of this mess for all medical providers to work as employees for a single entity (not the patient)?
I susepct Dr. Rotchford is guilty of nothing more than a minor technical error in attempting to recover a small portion of the cost of practicing from Medicaid. His experience bolsters my own conviction that I have done the smart thing by opting out of Medicare and refusing to accept Medicaid at all. More here.
I have read neither of these books, but both would appear to address the problem of "criminalization of almost everything."
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Why would the DEA be interested in Medicaid fraud? Why is that their jurisdiction?
ReplyDeleteMaybe DEA came along for the ride, or maybe the other agencies didn't have enough firepower to handle a physician. More likely the agency knows Rotchford gets addicts out of the black market drug trade and is therefor a threat to their job security.
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