Tom Cruise IS Right About Psychiatry

http://www.encognitive.com Although psychiatry is the smallest faction within the health care industry, authorities have estimated that psychiatric fraud accounts for 20 percent of fraudulent health care claims paid annually. This places the annual cost of psychiatric fraud in the tens of billions, ranging up to $40 billion per year, as described at the start of this article. Investigators routinely find psychiatrists responsible for a disproportionate share of the fraud and corruption within the health care industry. As far back as 1985, a U.S. Justice Department probe found that while psychiatrists represented only 8 percent of the physicians in the country, they accounted for 18 percent of the crooked doctors suspended from Medicaid programs over a 15-year period -- the worst performance of any group in the medical field. Crimes included charging for therapy when they had only doled out drugs; billing for patients who did not exist; falsely billing for up to 24 hours of therapy per day; and having sex with patients and billing the government for their lust. Florida Medicare investigators found that 40 percent of all mental health outpatient service billings in 1994 were fraudulent. And if fines collected by the federal government are an index, psychiatry is responsible for nearly 90 percent of the health care fraud in the United States. Of the $411 million paid in health-care-related fines in 1994, $379 million were paid by psychiatric hospitals.