This man has had his license yanked in New York and Oregon, and will soon be banned from practice in Australia, if he hasn't already.
It's an urban myth that incompetent doctors are allowed to practice indefinitely with no oversight. My own state of Arizona suspends or revokes dozens of medical licenses every year. And it's a myth that the various state medical boards do not communicate with each other; that may have been true once, but nowadays a suspension in one state is cause for suspension in any other state.
But the various notifications and investigations take time, if there is going to be anything like due process before someone's livelihood and twenty years of education is flushed down the toilet. And of course the investigatory process is clogged by complaints from unhappy patients who don't like their doctors' bedside manner or think his bill is too high. By law, each of those has to be investigated with the same diligence as they do for the doctor who does colostomies backwards.
The system is not perfect, but it's better than in any other country, and almost all the time it functions correctly. Horror stories like this are the rare exception, and that's why they are in the newspaper.
-ccm
That's what I suspected; thanks for the 'splanation.