Liquid Gold: Pain Doctors Soak Up Profits By Screening Urine For Drugs | Kaiser Health News – Nov 2017 – By Fred Schulte and Elizabeth Lucas
The cups of urine travel by express mail to the Comprehensive Pain Specialists lab in an industrial park in Brentwood, Tenn., not far from Nashville.
Most days bring more than 700 of the little sealed cups from clinics across 10 states, wrapped in red-tagged waste bags. The network treats about 48,000 people each month, and many will be tested for drugs.
Gloved lab techs keep busy inside the cavernous facility, piping smaller urine samples into tubes.
- First, there are tests to detect opiates that patients have been prescribed by CPS doctors.
- A second set identifies a wide range of drugs, both legal and illegal, in the urine.
The doctors’ orders are displayed on computer screens and tracked by electronic medical records. Test results go back to the clinics in four to five days. The urine ends up stored for a month inside a massive walk-in refrigerator.
The high-tech testing lab’s raw material has become liquid gold for the doctors who own Comprehensive Pain Specialists.
One nurse practitioner at the company’s clinic in Cleveland, Tenn., single-handedly generated $1.1 million in Medicare billings for urine tests that year, according to Medicare records.
Dr. Peter Kroll, one of the founders of CPS and its medical director, billed Medicare $1.8 million for these drug tests in 2015.
See also: Why Drug Tests are a Massive Scam
He said the costly tests are medically justified to monitor patients on pain pills against risks of addiction or even selling of pills on the black market.
Kaiser Health News, with assistance from researchers at the Mayo Clinic, analyzed available billing data from Medicare and private insurance billing nationwide, and found that spending on urine screens and related genetic tests quadrupled from 2011 to 2014 to an estimated $8.5 billion a year — more than the entire budget of the Environmental Protection Agency.
The federal government paid providers more to conduct urine drug tests in 2014 than it spent on the four most recommended cancer screenings combined.
Yet there are virtually no national standards regarding who gets tested, for which drugs and how often.
When so many other aspects of pain treatment have been detrimentally standardized, why is there no standard for this outrageous money-making loophole?
Perhaps because the people making the rules are often invested in these urine-testing scams themselves?
Payments have surged for urine tests for street drugs such as cocaine, PCP and ecstasy, which seldom have been detected in tests done on pain patients. In fact, court records show some of those tests showed up positive just 1 percent of the time.
Thirty-one pain practitioners received 80 percent or more of their Medicare income just from urine testing, which a federal official called a “red flag” that may signal overuse and could lead to a federal investigation.
“We’re focused on the fact that many physicians are making more money on testing than treating patients,” said Jason Mehta, an assistant U.S. attorney in Jacksonville, Fla. “It is troubling to see providers test everyone for every class of drugs every time they come in.”
‘It Was Almost A License To Steal’
As alarm spread about opioid deaths and overdoses in the past decade, doctors who prescribed the pills were looking for ways to prevent abuse and avert liability.
Entrepreneurs saw a lucrative business model: persuade doctors that testing would keep them out of trouble with licensing boards or law enforcement and protect their patients from harm.
Some companies offered doctors technical help opening up their own labs.
A 2011 whistleblower lawsuit against one of the nation’s top billers for urine tests, a San Diego-based laboratory owned by Millennium Health LLC, underscores the potential for profit.
“Doctor,” one lab representative said during sales calls, according to an affidavit, “drug testing is not about medicine but about making money, and I am going to show you how to make a lot of money.”
Millennium Health, billing records show, took in more than $166 million from Medicare in 2014 despite being the target of at least eight whistleblower cases alleging fraud over the past decade.
A Millennium sales manager involved in a 2012 case in Massachusetts reported earning $700,000 in salary and sales commissions in the previous year.
Millennium encouraged doctors to order more tests both as a way to lower patients’ risks and to shield the physicians against possible investigations by law enforcement or medical licensing boards, according to court filings.
Millennium denied the allegations in the whistleblower suits and settled all of them with the Justice Department in 2015 by agreeing to pay $256 million; its parent company, Millennium Lab Holdings II, declared bankruptcy.
Tests to detect drugs in urine can be basic and cheap.
This is the real insult: there is a much cheaper way to handle this issue and these extensive and expensive tests are absolutely unnecessary 99% of the time:
Doctors have long used testing cups with strips that change color when drugs are present. The cups cost less than $10 each, and a strip can detect 10 types of drugs or more at once and display the results in minutes.
All this expense might be justified if these expensive tests were the only ones that could detect the drugs being looked for, but…
After noticing that some labs were levying huge charges for these simple urine screens, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services moved in April 2010 to limit these billings.
To circumvent the new rules, some doctors scrapped cup testing in favor of specialized — and much costlier — tests performed on machines they installed in their facilities. These machines had one major advantage over the cups: Each test for each drug could be billed individually under Medicare rules.
“It was almost a license to steal. You had such a lucrative possibility, it was very tempting to sell as many [tests] as you can,” said Charles Root, a longtime lab industry consultant whose company, CodeMap, has tracked the rise of testing labs in doctors’ offices.
Voluminous Drug Tests
The CPS testing lab in Tennessee opened in 2013, not long before a pain specialist named William Wagner moved from New Mexico to open a CPS clinic in Anderson, S.C.
“All of their money was being made off of urine drug screens. They weren’t doing anything else properly,” Wagner said. The lawsuit is pending in federal court in Nashville.
Kroll acknowledged that urine tests are profit-makers, but stressed that verifying that patients aren’t abusing drugs gives him a “whole different level of confidence that I’m doing something right for the patients’ condition.”
The company said that its Medicare billing practices, including urine screens, had withstood a “very in-depth” government audit.
The audit initially called for repayment of $25 million but was settled in 2016 for less than $7,000, according to the company. Medicare officials had no comment.
In 2014, when CPS was among Medicare’s major urine-test billers, Tennessee led the nation in Medicare spending on urine drug tests run by doctors with in-house labs, according to federal billing records.
Nothing says corruption like seeing one of those super-expensive machines owned by a doctor and run in their own office when each drug tested for can be billed separately.
How Much Is Too Much?
There is wide disagreement among legislators, medical trade associations and the state boards that license doctors over the best approach to urine testing.
One association of pain specialists argued in 2008 that urine testing could be done as often as weekly, while others have balked at that frequency.
Indiana’s medical board ordered mandatory urine tests for all pain patients in late 2013, only to face a lawsuit from the American Civil Liberties Union, which argued that the policy was unconstitutional and an unlawful search. Officials backed down the next year, and current policy states that testing can be done “at any time the physician determines that it is medically necessary.”
In long-awaited guidelines issued in March 2016, the CDC called for testing at the start of opioid therapy and once a year for long-term users. Beyond that, it said, testing should be “left up to the discretion” of the medical professional.
There is likewise little scientific justification for many of these new types of drug testing that have made their way onto doctors’ order sheets and laboratory menus.
Government officials have criticized the explosive growth in testing for some prescription drugs, notably a class of tranquilizers known as tricyclic antidepressants.
What, they are now testing for antidepressants? (These medications are NOT tranquilizers)
These tests are clearly another way to make money from pain patients, even if their pain is barely being treated.
Medicare paid more than $45 million in 2014 for more than 200,000 people to be tested for tricyclic drugs, often multiple times.
The Department of Justice argued in a 2012 whistleblower case that these tests often couldn’t be justified because of “low abuse potential” of the drugs and a “lack of abuse history for the vast majority of patients.”
None of that matters to someone trying to get rich.
Income Breakdown Raises ‘Red Flag’
When told that drug screens accounted for most of the Medicare income for dozens of pain doctors, federal officials said that was troubling.
Starting in 2016, Medicare began to crack down on urine billings as part of a federal law that is supposed to reset lab fees for the first time in three decades.
Now tougher scrutiny of urine testing, and cuts in reimbursements, may be threatening CPS — or at least its profits.
CPS closed nine clinics last year and told its doctors that urine-testing revenue had dropped off 32 percent in the first quarter of the year, according to a letter then-CEO Davis sent its physician partners.
EDS and Chronic Pain News & Info 