Racketeers, M.D.

New Yorkers were beginning to wonder just how pure the boasted ethics of the medical profession really are. When 175 Manhattan doctors were temporarily suspended from practicing in workmen's compensation cases last week, the total number of New York City's 16,000 physicians thus convicted of crooked dealing this year passed the 1,000 mark. (The figure might be even higher if 890 accused doctors now in uniform had not been excused from answering charges.) The suspensions were the result of a State drive against one of the nation's richest rackets: the "kickback" racket that has netted unscrupulous New York insurance men, lawyers, physicians and X-ray laboratories as much as $5,000,000 a year.

How the racket works: an injured workman is told by a "steerer" (usually a lawyer or insurance man) which doctor to go to; the doctor then pads his fees to double the normal amount (or, more often, by prolonging treatment unnecessarily) and sends a kickback to the steerer. If the doctor refers the patient to a specialist or an X-ray laboratory, he gets a second piece of dirty money when the specialist or laboratory pads fees in turn and kicks some back to him.

The racket is well known to New York's State and local medical societies, which pass on doctors' eligibility to treat workmen's compensation cases. But they did nothing about it until prodded by the Moreland Commission, sponsored and appointed by ex-racket-busting Governor Thomas E. Dewey.

The Moreland report has resulted in: 1) eighteen amendments to New York's compensation law; 2) attempts at suicide by two compensation officials.

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