If your doctor drives any, and certainly all of the cars listed below, there is a virtually 100% certainty said doctor is a criminal...
[3]
... just like the above noted "Doctor" Xiulu Ruan, M.D., who is a doctor only by title: his real descrption is "legal" drug dealer, one who provides pain medication to drug addicted junkies for a (high) fee, and who is a favorite brand ambassador of such "legal' drug makers as Insys Therapeutics, maker of the Subsys 400 microgram [4]Fentanyl anti-pain spray.
"Dr." Ruan, together with his business partner John Patrick Couch, M.D, were arrested earlier today on drug and fraud charges (full indictment pdf here [5]) as part of an FBI and DEA raid of Physicians' Pain Specialists of Alabama Pain Center on Springhill Avenue and Airport Boulevard in Mobile. The practice, together with the adjacent pharmacy, C&R Pharmacy, was all part of a wildly profitably pain drug distribution ring.
The cars listed above, and which have now been confiscated by the state of Alabama, are what Ruan purchased with the spoils of fraudulently selling pain drugs to starved junkies, all under legal pretenses (the Pain Specialists website [6]notes that on 4/18/2013, "Xiulu Ruan, MD, a fellowship trained physician, has broken his own world record of having 7 medical board/subspecialty board certifications [7]."), and then padding his reimbursement demands from benefits programs.
Turns out Ruan's 7 'record' certifications were not enough and now he is assured of spending lenghty time in prison.
Why?
According to the charging document, Ruan and Couch, "conspired with each other and with others... to knowingly, willfully, and unlawfully distribute and dispense, and cause to be distributed and dispensed, Schedule II controlled substances including but not limited to: Oxycodone, Oxymorphone, Hydromorphone, Morphine, Fenantul, and Methadone, outside the usual course of professional practice and not for a legitimate medial purpose."
But for a perfectly legitimate business purpose: to make "tons of money", by first getting patients hooked to pain medications, and then stuffing them full of near lethal doses of said drugs, all of which the "doctors" would then get reimbursement for, while making both themselves and the manufacturing company millions of dollars:
According to the Grand Jury charge, "the objective of the conspiracy was to unlawfully increase the amount of reimbursement received from healthcare benefits programs."
But that's just the tip of the iceberg.
The real crime in question lies not so much with "doctors" Ruan and Couch who were merely low-level drug distributors, but with drug manufacturing and wholesale companies, particularly such as the abovementioned Insys makes of Subsys, which is the topic of a recent investigative piece by the Boyd Roddy of the Southern Investigative Reporting Foundation titled "Insys Therapeutics and The New “Killing It [8]."
This is what Roddy had to say about INSY, a $2 billion market cap company, whose story provides a good glimpse into just how biotech companies have shortcutted their way to blockbuster stardom in the last few years:
Insys Therapeutics is doing pretty darn well. The company has had a remarkable level of financial success and its soaring stock price has made it a darling on Wall Street.
But that level of growth ought to warrant a raised eyebrow; going to over $222 million sales from about $15.5 million in just two years without inventing something like a better search engine is no mean feat. Fentanyl, after all, has been around for many years and while Subsys is the only spray version available, several of Insys’s competitors are well-established and better capitalized, with sales forces that reach all 50 states.
While details on the particulars of the breakthrough pain medication market are hard to find, or at least details that aren't self-serving management estimates, veteran sales staff from Insys and other pharmaceutical companies put its growth prospects at roughly 10% a year. If that's true, and the company is selling to oncologists then growth possibilities for Insys should be a function of that plus whatever they can take away from its larger competitors. Many companies would be happy for those odds.
But Insys grew north of 100%, implying that whatever organic growth they are getting is being aided by a whole lot of doctors who have grown profoundly fond of an expensive drug that brings an acre of governmental red-tape with it and that one of the largest pharmacy benefit managers will no longer touch.
The question then becomes "How?" and "Why?"
A SIRF investigation into Insys reveals that this growth has come at a remarkable price: Food and Drug Administration data shows that Subsys is proving lethal to a growing number of patients, many of whom, like Carolyn Markland, are taking it for so-called off-label indications, such as headaches and back pain.
For more answers of what really takes place every day in the corrupt underbelly of America's healthcare industry, the linked 4,100-word piece is a must read [8]for anyone with even a passing interest in not only said industry, but for a spoiler alert, one need to only look at this table of the highest reimbursed doctors doctors for the 2013-2014 period under TRICARE [9], the U.S. military’s primary health insurance plan, one which represents 9.5 million people or 3% of the US population.
So, here's to you, Doctor Charlatan Xiulu Ruan: we hope prescribing millions in overpriced, potentially deadly pain medication to US army vets was worth it, and that the 13 sports cars you purchased on their hurting backs will either keep you warm at night, and keeps Bubba away during those long nights at the Talladega Federal Correctional Institution.
Source: US Indictment against John Patrick Couch and Xiulu Ruan [5]
