Miami Herald
By John Dorschner
January 16, 2010

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.”

The practices of Fernando Mendez-Villamil, who has an office on Coral Way, came to light last month when Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, complained about him to federal authorities for writing prescriptions at a rate of 150 a day, seven days a week. Grassley, like many in Congress, is concerned about reducing America’s high healthcare costs to reform the system.

The Florida Agency for Health Care Administration has released data showing that those prescription-writing practices were expensive, too — since the patients had Medicaid, the state-federal insurance for the poor.

State Sen. Don Gaetz, R-Destin, chairman of the Senate healthcare committee, told The Miami Herald on Friday that the Legislature has “a tough law already on the books” that requires state regulators to investigate outliers like Mendez-Villamil, who writes twice as many anti-psychotic drugs as any other doctor in the state. But his case may mean the law needs to be tougher.

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