Grassley, who is the ranking Republican on the US Senate Finance Committee, is investigating the relationship between WebMD and drugmakers after learning the web site is running a TV ad that encourage people to take a depression-screening test sponsored by Eli Lilly, which sells Cymbalta.
As part of his ongoing investigation of conflicts of interest in biomedicine, Senator Charles Grassley (R–IA) now wants to comb through the e-mails of Thomas Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH).
A Miami psychiatrist who wrote 284,908 prescriptions over the past six years has cost Florida taxpayers $43 million, and a state senator said Friday that “he should be a poster boy” for a legislative inquiry into whether “tougher enforcement provisions are needed.”
Medicare has stopped reimbursing a Miami psychiatrist who prescribed about 96,685 mental health drugs to Medicaid patients in 18 months. U.S. Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa said the figures are alarming and has asked the Department of Health and Human Services to investigate Dr. Fernando Mendez Villamil and other top prescribers.
The letter from Senator Grassley does not mention Fernando Mendez-Villamil by name, but it cites documents from the Florida Agency for Healthcare Administration about a prescriber who wrote 96,685 prescriptions for from the last quarter of 2007 through the first quarter of 2009 for Medicaid patients. Mendez-Villamil wrote nearly twice as many prescriptions for psychiatric drugs as the No. 2 Medicaid prescriber in the state.