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Medicare Fraud Law Having Unexpected Consequences
10/21/09 - 01:48 PM

Associated Press

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A new state law designed to crack down on Medicaid fraud is having unexpected consequences for some health care professionals.

State lawmakers passed a bill this year that prevents doctors, nurses, pharmacists and other medical professionals from getting licensed in Florida if they have old felony convictions for drugs or fraud.

The law bans people with such convictions from getting new or renewed licenses until at least 15 years after they’ve completed their sentences. In less than four months, the law has resulted in the denial of 14 new license applications and the withdrawal of 17.

The state is not enforcing the law on license renewals yet because it may violate the constitution.

Supporters say the law was intended to prevent drug felons from gaining more access to medications, as well as weed out crooked medical providers.

The Florida Nurses Association argues the measure goes too far. Attorney Anna Small says it doesn’t make sense to ban people from becoming medical professionals for relatively small indiscretions, such as getting caught with marijuana when they were young.

“If you’re going to penalize someone who made a youthful mistake late in high school or early college for the next 15 years or more, that seems pretty steep to me and there’s no reason that many of those people couldn’t be very productive health care providers or nurses in our state. We need them,” Small said.

“The only thing that our Board of Nursing can tell them now is that they can go and get licensed in another state, which does nothing to help our critical nursing shortage. We don’t want to encourage people to go to other states.”

“Sometimes when we craft legislation to take care of a larger issue we end up having unintended consequences and I believe this is one of those unintended consequences where many of our nurses may not be able to practice their profession and take them away from doing the job that’s providing food to their families.”

“I think what we need to do is probably re-look at this and make sure there are some waivers or some guidelines that we can see and take account as to when the incident occurred and does it relate to the profession that they’re doing at this current time,” Rep. Jennifer Carroll (R) Fleming Island said.

Rep. Jennifer Carroll, who helped draft similar legislation, says it appears the law may be too far-reaching and she’s open to revisiting the issue.

Carroll says sometimes legislation has unintended consequences and she does not want to penalize people for convictions that may not relate to their current jobs.

Another quirk in the law is that it applies only to violations of Florida or federal laws, so people convicted of the same crimes in other states can still get a medical license in Florida.

The Nurses Association says that’s not fair. It wants lawmakers to repeal the provision and allow licensing boards to examine people’s applications on a case-by-case basis.