Rural health care providers hope reform includes tougher safeguards against drug abuse, fraud

As Congress continues to debate health care reform, rural doctors, nurses and pharmacists hope legislation will expand insurance coverage for drug treatment and rehabilitation, and stronger safeguards against abuse and fraud in government health programs. Many rural health care providers eagerly await health care reform, Halimah Abdullah of McClatchy's Washington Bureau reports, but they fear Congress won't include proper incentives for rural hospitals to cover their costs and recruit talented doctors.

If Congress doesn't go far enough in efforts to eliminate Medicaid waste and prescription drug fraud, many rural health care providers say their jobs will become tougher. A recent report showed the rate of prescriptions for controlled substances skyrocketed between 2005 and 2007 in Kentucky, with some of the largest increases coming the the state's least populated counties. Officials have no specific data regarding how many of the prescriptions were paid for with Medicaid, Abdullah reports, but drug enforcement officers and health care providers say the program is partly to blame for the increase.

Kentucky uses a system called Kentucky All Schedule Prescription Electronic Reporting System to monitor if patients are visiting different doctors to get multiple prescriptions, but only 26 percent of the state's 14,000 medical professionals licensed to prescribe controlled substances have KASPER accounts, Abdullah reports. Many representatives of rural areas in Congress are pushing for rural equity in health care reform, but the prospects for it are uncertain. "The lack of rural parity is a big problem, and it's crucial to whether I vote for it or not," U.S. Rep. Ben Chandler, D-Ky., told Abdullah. "If you could stop some of the fraud and stop the drug abuse itself you could save a lot of money in societal costs." (Read more)