Originally published July 9 2008
Dead Doctors Paid Millions by Medicare to Practice Medicine Beyond the Grave (satire)
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
(NaturalNews) Conventional medicine has a brilliant new career strategy for ambitious professionals: Earn money even after you're dead! As revealed in a new congressional investigation, Medicare has paid out 478,500 claims on health services to doctors who died before they performed such services. Say that again? Yes, dead doctors are being paid tens of millions of dollars by Medicare!
This business model is apparently even more lucrative than farmers who are paid money by the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture to NOT grow crops: One dead doctor raked in $479,000 in Medicare payments for services rendered in 2002 to 2007. Mysteriously, the doctor died in 1999.
According to this congressional report, Medicare has paid out as much as $92 million to 18,240 dead doctors. A frighteningly large percentage of those doctors (16 percent) have been dead for 10 to 15 years! (This is all factual, by the way. You can read about it in the NY Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/09/washington... )
While this number may be surprising, it does, perhaps, explain why so many doctors seem to be functioning like brain-dead zombies today: They're expired! And yet their egos are so persistent that even death cannot prevent them from practicing U.S. government-approved medicine (and being paid handsomely for it).
The most fascinating observation about this congressional report is that practicing modern pharmaceutical medicine apparently does not require a physician to actually be living. I'm curious: Were the patients aware they were being treated by dead doctors, or did the complete lack of communication between doctor and patient seem so typical that no one noticed?
Are the patients dead, too?
Now, I know that doctors are an unhealthy bunch of professionals who die younger than almost anyone else, but I was not aware that a medical license granted doctors permission to continue practicing medicine after they kicked the bucket. I suppose with all the doctors using stethoscopes to check the heartbeats of their patients, none of them thought to check their own colleagues for a pulse...
I wouldn't be surprised, either, to learn that dead doctors are earning Continuing Medical Education (CME) credits by pretending to attend "educational" seminars sponsored by drug companies. Weekend at Bernie's, anyone?
The congressional Medicare report did not reveal whether the dead doctors were performing health services on live patients or dead patients, but given that physician-caused deaths now exceed 783,000 people a year in the United States alone(2), it would not be surprising to learn that dead physicians are trying to get more patients to join them on "the other side" by killing them with pharmaceuticals and chemotherapy.
Psych drugs for corpses
Which brings me to my suggestion on this matter: With so many dead physicians practicing medicine today, I think we should expand the scope of their activities and allow them to practice medicine on dead patients, too. Specifically, a new line of Merck pharmaceuticals should be invented that would prevent dry rot, rehydrate flaky skin, restore decomposing bones and allow dead patients to participate in our health care system, even if they have no verifiable level of electrical brain activity.
After all, dead patients deserve "treatment," too, don't they?
And why stop there? Why not dose them with psychiatric drugs, too, and make the U.S. government pay for that? Death must certainly qualify as a traumatic event, don't you think? Dead patients must be suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and therefore require psychiatric drugs. I'm sure the American Psychiatric Association would handily agree with this clinical assessment. We'll write it into the next edition of the DSM.
I hear the FDA is close to approving Prozac for use on corpses as a way to ease after-death anxiety. (Viagra is not needed, since they're already stiff.) This milestone decision could open up a whole new era of "afterlife medicine," with incredible benefits to the U.S. economy! Imagine: Drug companies could now expand their customer base to include all the deceased individuals that ever lived -- including the ones they previously killed with their own dangerous prescription medications!
Now, with deceased drug treatments in the works, Big Pharma could medicate and kill patients over and over again, reaping windfall profits while keeping scores of dead doctors dutifully employed treating dead patients! It's a whole new economy, folks!
Modern medicine, after all, isn't about keeping people alive. It's about keeping people medicated. And there is no FDA requirement that pharmaceuticals only be given to living patients, is there? Why not just medicate all the corpses and claim they were "morbidly obese?"
And think of the benefits: If you're already dead, dangerous drugs no longer have dangerous side effects! After all, Vioxx can't kill you twice, right? One heart attack death is all you ever need suffer, and from that point forward, you'll never have a drug-induced heart attack, stroke or anal leakage event ever again. Sure, your bones might fall off, but who hasn't suffered a bout of the dropsies from time to time, anyway?
This congressional Medicare report has opened us up to a new world of economic opportunity, and I hope the next U.S. President jumps on this opportunity to show the world the kind of leadership the United States still possesses. It's time for us to show our true colors and establish the USA as the world leader in practicing pharmaceutical medicine on the almost-living.
The first patient, of course, should be John McCain.
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