Wednesday, January 21, 1998

Government gets tough on deadbeat docs

Donna Shalala is getting tough, and that's just fine.

The secretary of health and human services has announced that 1,402 health care practitioners -- physicians, dentists, chiropractors and others -- are now prohibited from making any money off the government's Medicare and Medicaid programs.

The reason: They have defaulted on $107 million worth of student loan payments underwritten by the government, forcing the government to pay them back itself.

How do you explain these deadbeats? Most of them are presumably making a decent enough living. Even if they weren't, the government, which has been pleading with them for years, would have worked out easy repayment plans for them.

By their refusal to cough up what they owe -- about $76,000 each on average -- they have done no favors for a 20-year-old program that helped them and roughly another 160,000 people get health care training. And they have cheated their fellow taxpayers.

Cutting these practitioners off from Medicare and Medicaid patients is almost certainly going to hurt at least some of them, as will another Shalala directive, printing their names on the Internet (http://www.defaulteddocs.dhhs.gov).

The vast majority of people in the loan program make good on their debts; as a result of this initiative, more probably will now. Shalala has done the right thing. It's too bad that these deadbeat health practitioners did not.