Some members of Congress are alarmed by our latest investigative report on Dr. Tariq Mahmood’s hospitals.
The story, published Sunday, showed that regulators gave the six Texas hospitals nearly $18 million in economic stimulus funds for switching to electronic medical records — despite documented patient-safety and management crises at most of the facilities. The story also raised questions about whether the hospitals actually made “meaningful use” of the records, as required.
“Not only did the Obama Administration take millions of dollars from taxpayers to fund this portion of his so-called ‘stimulus’ plan, it failed to institute a system of checks and balances to safeguard that money from the kind of fraud and abuse alleged in this case,” said Rep. Jeb Hensarling. The Dallas Republican represents two of the six small towns where Mahmood’s hospitals operated: Terrell and Grand Saline.
Sen. Chuck Grassley, an an Iowa Republican who has long served on the powerful Finance Committee, focused his ire on the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. The federal agency gave two of Mahmood’s hospitals stimulus payments in early 2013 while it was moving to terminate their Medicare funding.
“It’s worrisome that one part of an agency doled out federal money to a hospital even as another part of the agency took money away,” Grassley said. “CMS needs to make sure its divisions are communicating, especially when taxpayer money is involved.”
CMS has declined to comment, citing an FBI investigation of the rewards and other issues related to Mahmood.
The doctor, who owns a 10,000-square-foot house in the Dallas suburb of Cedar Hill, was charged in April with conspiring to defraud the federal government of $1.1 million for patient care at his hospitals. He has denied any wrongdoing. He is free on bond but has lost control of all the facilities.
The rewards were part of a multibillion-dollar national effort to promote electronic records. A federal fraud-prevention watchdog warned CMS in 2012 that it wasn’t doing enough to screen doctors and hospitals who sought the money.
Now Rep. Michael Burgess, R-Lewisville, wants the watchdog — the U.S. Health and Human Services Department’s inspector general — to investigate further. Our story, he said, raises questions about the entire program’s integrity.
The watchdog’s 2013 work plan promises to delve further into the rewards. “We will review Medicare incentive payment data from 2011 to identify payments to providers that should not have received incentive payments,” it says.
Burgess, who’s also a physician, expressed amazement at the conditions found at Mahmood’s hospitals. Among them: unsterilized surgical instruments, disconnected utilities, boxes of medical records that “appeared to have been chewed” by rodents, and lack of care leading to patients’ deaths.
“It is shocking in this day and age,” Burgess said, “in a state that’s as wealthy as Texas.”
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Here are some of my colleague Miles Moffeit’s previous reports on Mahmood’s hospitals, in chronological order: