News-At-A-Glance: Another WSJ Story Implicating Laboratories

Once again, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) has published an article based on data from the April data dump by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. This article, published in mid-November, addresses testing seniors for drugs, both legal and illegal, by physicians who the article alleges are doing it for the money because the drugs being tested would likely never be used by seniors. Tests for drugs such as heroin, cocaine, and angel dust, the street name for phencyclidine (PCP), are rarely, if ever, positive in samples from seniors. According to the article, this is an unintended consequence of the war on pain killer addiction. The numbers are staggering. Medicare paid $445 million in 2012 alone, which represents a 1,423 percent increase in just five years. According to the article, doctors have established drug testing labs, rather than refer drug tests to an outside lab, because they cannot bill Medicare if they do not do the tests themselves. When Medicare cracked down on payments for waived versions of these drug tests, some physicians added gas chromatography equipment to perform more sophisticated tests for which they were getting paid for each individual test. They also use panels of tests to increase volume. Medicare and its contractors are taking steps to curb this kind of abuse, but regardless of the outcome, honest laboratories likely will suffer more restrictive policies related to drug testing before Medicare corrects this problem.