Posted on 04/09/2014 5:29:42 PM PDT by Nachum
The Florida doctor who entangled Sen. Robert Menendez in an FBI investigation also turns out to be the nation’s No. 1 recipient of Medicare funds.
Dr. Salomon Melgin, the Florida eye surgeon, charged the government $320 for giving 37,075 injections of an eye-drug to 645 patients. That’s an average of 57 injections per patient, costing the taxpayer $21 million in 2012.
The data was buried in an April 9 release of Medicare data by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Studies.
The wealthy doctor lives in a palatial house in in North Palm Beach, and donated heavily to Menendez. He’s now the target of at least one FBI investigation, which included raids on his offices in January and October 2013.
Menendez got entangled in the doctor’s finances when he used Melgen’s private plane to fly Menendez to various locales, including vacation sites in the Dominican Republic. Menendez took at least three trips on the doctor’s airplane in 2010.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailycaller.com ...
One of his campaign clips had him in an urban nieghborhood claiming he lives not far fron here, funny
57 eye injections per patient per year?
Their eyes would look like sieves.
More than one injection per week on average?
No one ever take a vacation or get sick in Palm Beach?
This could be nothing but a complete, total, innocent coincidence! Good grief, you people are absolute conspiracy nuts!
The system has been taken over by the left and co-opted Republicans.
I fear it is too late
They both skated on their previous mutual scandal.Now we know why-—gotta keep up the self-dealing at all costs.
What a racket..
This is the Doc with the Dominican hooker jet frequented by Menindez.
Other democrats, Obama and Reid, mentioned in this NYT article:
Yeah. Sen. Menendez likes teenage girls.
Hey, Uday Hussein liked 'em too.
What I see listed as the usual dose is one injection every 4 weeks, which even with both eyes involved makes 57 injections per patient per year problematic. Maybe more than 'usual' frequency of injections is supported by something in the eye literature and maybe some old folks in Florida think they're worth not $50k but $100k/year so they can keep reading those butterfly ballots. As a mere dermatologist I hope to never learn more details about such shots personally.
Maybe some of the injections were not the real drug.
Thanks for the insight!
No pun intended!
That's a very reasonable number for a monthly drug, especially considering that some patients will have two eyeballs needing treatment. His high total charges thus reflect only that he's treating more people with macular degeneration than anything else. Which strikes me as a very good reason to pick a doctor for something like this. The only thing I see wrong with the doctor is his taste in friends and politics.
I always hate it when well reasoned and thoughtful responses come at the end of a thread. It means fewer people have read and absorbed what was written.
You’ve helped me at least.
Nice knowing you are here!
I’m annoyed with myself. I knew the key missing datum—that there were 5 ‘units’ billed per shot— when I made my post at #11, but didn’t realize the article writer lacked it until my final explication at #14. And I’d intended to ping a couple others who’d posted upthread once I’d explained things by ‘doing the math.’ But I forgot. My plate must be too full this week. So I’ll use your nice post as an excuse to ping those I’d missed.
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