spini4
Bluelighter
- Joined
- Nov 18, 2003
- Messages
- 795
WICHITA, Kan. — The high number of patient deaths at their clinic should have alerted a Kansas doctor and his wife that their policies, practices and prescriptions were deadly, a federal prosecutor told jurors Tuesday.
Dr. Stephen Schneider and his wife, Linda, have been charged with unlawfully prescribing drugs, health care fraud and money laundering at their Haysville clinic, which has been linked to 68 deaths.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Tanya Treadway said in closing arguments Tuesday that evidence presented during the eight-week trial told "a sordid tale of how money, not medicine" controlled the defendants' actions. She said the Schneiders cheated people out of life.
Defense attorneys were to make their closing arguments later Tuesday. The defense has challenged autopsy findings that drug overdoses caused the deaths. Schneider testified he was duped by patients who faked their pain.
Summing up, Treadway recounted patients' testimony that Schneider was known as a "drug dealer in a white coat" or "Schneider the Writer." Another called the Schneider Medical Clinic "the Burger King for pain pill addicts."
Treadway said the clinic wrote prescriptions 76 times for patients after they had gone to hospital emergency rooms for overdoses. In 46 of those instances, the prescriptions provided the same drugs that the patients had overdosed on.
The government has attributed 176 overdoses and deaths to their Haysville clinic, noting 18 percent of drug overdose deaths in a multi-county area were its patients.
"If this clinic was a legitimate pain management practice ... the defendants would have taken action in the face of these overdoses and deaths," Treadway said.
But the clinic took no action, she said, noting the doctor once called the people who died of overdoses "bad grapes."
Government and private insurance programs paid more than $6 million for controlled drugs prescribed by the clinic, losses the programs should not have paid, she said.
continued at http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/37703695/ns/health-pain_center
Dr. Stephen Schneider and his wife, Linda, have been charged with unlawfully prescribing drugs, health care fraud and money laundering at their Haysville clinic, which has been linked to 68 deaths.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Tanya Treadway said in closing arguments Tuesday that evidence presented during the eight-week trial told "a sordid tale of how money, not medicine" controlled the defendants' actions. She said the Schneiders cheated people out of life.
Defense attorneys were to make their closing arguments later Tuesday. The defense has challenged autopsy findings that drug overdoses caused the deaths. Schneider testified he was duped by patients who faked their pain.
Summing up, Treadway recounted patients' testimony that Schneider was known as a "drug dealer in a white coat" or "Schneider the Writer." Another called the Schneider Medical Clinic "the Burger King for pain pill addicts."
Treadway said the clinic wrote prescriptions 76 times for patients after they had gone to hospital emergency rooms for overdoses. In 46 of those instances, the prescriptions provided the same drugs that the patients had overdosed on.
The government has attributed 176 overdoses and deaths to their Haysville clinic, noting 18 percent of drug overdose deaths in a multi-county area were its patients.
"If this clinic was a legitimate pain management practice ... the defendants would have taken action in the face of these overdoses and deaths," Treadway said.
But the clinic took no action, she said, noting the doctor once called the people who died of overdoses "bad grapes."
Government and private insurance programs paid more than $6 million for controlled drugs prescribed by the clinic, losses the programs should not have paid, she said.
continued at http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/37703695/ns/health-pain_center
