Doctors in five states charged with prescribing pain killers for cash, sex
Source: Washington Post
Dozens of medical professionals in five states were charged Wednesday with participating in the illegal prescribing of more than 32 million pain pills, including doctors who prosecutors said traded sex for prescriptions and a dentist who unnecessarily pulled teeth from patients to justify giving them opioids.
The 60 people indicted include 31 doctors, seven pharmacists, eight nurse practitioners and seven other licensed medical professionals. The charges involve more than 350,000 illegal prescriptions written in Kentucky, Ohio, Tennessee, Alabama and West Virginia, according to indictments unsealed in federal court in Cincinnati.
“That is the equivalent of one opioid dose for every man, woman and child in the five states in the region that we’ve been targeting,” Brian Benczkowski, an assistant attorney general in charge of the Justice Department’s criminal division, said in an interview. “If these medical professionals behave like drug dealers, you can rest assured that the Justice Department is going to treat them like drug dealers.”
The charges include unlawful distribution or dispensing of controlled substances by a medical professional and health-care fraud. Each count carries a maximum 20-year prison sentence, and many of the defendants face multiple counts. At least one doctor is charged in connection with a death caused by the opioids, officials said.
Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/doctors-in-five-states-charged-with-prescribing-pain-killers-for-cash-sex/2019/04/17/7670d20e-607e-11e9-9ff2-abc984dc9eec_story.html
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that we know how bad it is with student loans for college but it's many times worse for going that next 4 years for med school! 
I know my mother used to talk about China's "barefoot Doctors" that deployed into the rural areas of China where most lived during the '40s & '50s. And attempts at government-subsidizing of medical schooling to have more doctors in the U.S. willing to live/work in some of the areas that are most-impacted by this epidemic, keep getting torpedoed by the GOP or become scams for unscrupulous 3rd parties to steal the funding.
Build that wall!!!! 
I'm sure every one of those "doctors" and "pharmacists" and "pharmaceutical executives" (cough, cough, Richard Sackler) are illegal immigrants from south of the border!
how some can get the scripts of that like candy and others have to go through all sorts of hoops and state tracking (like here in PA) and whatnot.
I know after I had major surgery a little over 10 years ago, I had to put on a performance to continue morphine barely 2 days after the surgery while still in the hospital, because... um.... giving me "Tylenol" instead was a friggin' joke. 
Usually WaPo puts a link in their articles to a press release and/or to the docket, but didn't (and I didn't get chance to hunt for them). 
