Health News Florida
By Carol Gentry
January 15, 2010

Since 2004, a Miami psychiatrist has prescribed almost 14 million pills to Medicaid patients at a cost to taxpayers of $43 million, a state agency says.

Fernando Mendez-Villamil would have had to issue 4,000 prescriptions a month, or 1,000 a week, to keep up that pace, according to the report released this week by the Agency for Health Care Administration. Altogether in the six years from 2004-09, he issued nearly 285,000 prescriptions, the AHCA report showed.

However, AHCA noted that that total counts a refill as a prescription. The agency said its report does not conclude that Mendez-Villamil’s prescribing is improper; its investigation continues.

Mendez-Villamil’s status as the most prolific prescriber in the state was already known, based on a report released in December of a 21-month period in  2007-09. But that period was mild compared to the years before, the new data show, and a timeline suggests that the prescribing slowed down markedly after the state began implementing computer tracking and other controls.

His highest-prescribing year in the period studied was 2004, when he issued about 62,400 prescriptions that cost Medicaid $12.2 million, according to the chart. The number of patients: that year: 2,695. A quick calculation shows that he issued 23 prescriptions (or refills) per patient, for a total of more than 1,200 pills apiece.

Sen. Don Gaetz, chairman of the health regulation committee, said Mendez-Villamil “appears to be taking advantage of the taxpayers of Florida and draining money away from legitimate patients. He should be the poster boy for tougher enforcement actions.”

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