Charlie’s Medical Board Repeatedly Violates the Sherman Act

By: Bharani Padmanabhan – Dec. 2017

In the U.S. the government shall not favor one competitor over another within the marketplace. Charlie Baker’s Board of Registration in Medicine does this routinely.

The state medical board, statutorily required to be neutral, in fact is on sale to the higher bidder and routinely rents its powers out to doctors and hospitals in the marketplace so they can eliminate their competitors. This is a fundamental fact about how business is done in this state.

The only reason Rose McGowan has not been defamed by rich liberal progressives as an unstable conspiracy theorist is because it was the New Yorker that revealed her as the victim of an undercover operation arranged by Al Gore’s progressive lawyer and the reliably progressive Harvey Weinstein. If McGowan was who first said she was under surveillance, the entire clique of liberal journalists and card-carrying Democrats would have laughed at her.

Similarly, this column demonstrates the way Charlie’s board works, through its own words in a sworn transcript and an official order. Good luck calling this a conspiracy theory.

Dr. Mark Hughes is a super-specialist in treatment of the retina of the eye. There are few doctors in Massachusetts of his caliber. His license was temporarily suspended when he pled guilty to cheating on his taxes and was sent to prison for a few months. The agreement with the Board was that he would give the community 2,000 hours of free eye care upon his return and he arranged to do that immediately upon his release. We all love redemption, yes?

At that point, doctors at Mass. Eye and Ear Institute created a fake narrative. They cherry picked through his files on patients they had never seen and sent a manufactured record to Board “investigators” Marion Ead and James Paikos via lawyer Michael Kendall from McDermott Will & Emory. Kendall’s letter emphasized that the eye doctors wished to remain anonymous.

Doctors are required to report other doctors for substandard care. Named after MGL ch. 112 section 5F, doctors’ 5F reports must not be anonymous because “mandatory reporters” are granted certain protections to ensure the truth. And they cannot be filed by lawyers.

Section 5F also requires board investigators to evaluate a report first before running with it. Marion Ead and James Paikos chose otherwise, knowing the records were cherry picked, incomplete and submitted suspiciously by anonymous competitors. Red flags abounded.

Here is what Marion Ead said under oath to Dr. Hughes’ lawyer after claiming she investigated, at taxpayer expense, for two long years:

Lawyer: Which doctors came forward in this case?
Ead: We don’t have any names of individual physicians.
Lawyer: Did that trouble you as an investigator [at the Board] that you don’t have the name of a single physician?
Ead: (No response)
Lawyer: So you had this complaint for two years.
Ead: Yes.
Lawyer: Tell me what you personally did to identify who was behind this statutory report.
Ead: I can’t —
Lawyer: Did you do anything?
Ead: No, I didn’t.
Lawyer: What efforts did you make to interview the complaining witness in this case?
Ead: We didn’t interview them.
Lawyer: But you can insist on the name of who is giving the complaint.
Ead: That is not my role to do that.
Lawyer: Whose role is it?
Ead: It’s complaint counsel. [James Paikos]
Lawyer: Did you ask complaint counsel to do it?
Ead: (No response)
Lawyer: Patients J and K were never seen by an MEEI physician, isn’t that correct?
Ead: I can’t remember.
Lawyer: Well, would it strike you that the MEEA doctors, the unnamed doctors, are now going through records when they are not even treating the patients? Wouldn’t that have struck you as odd?
Ead: It would have.
Lawyer: Did you notice that?
Ead: I didn’t notice that, no.

The magistrate correctly declared that the anonymous report was improper and the case must be dismissed. Charlie’s board was forced to dismiss the fake case and give Dr. Hughes his license back, after he was forced to spend money to defend himself for two extra years without any income.

Dr. Hughes’ competitors at MEEI were allowed a good run for two years. And what do they want now? To join Partners so they can charge even more money. How much is ever enough?

Charlie’s board however refused to accept that it broke the law by whacking him on behalf of anonymous competitors because doing so would raise the next damning question:

How much did James Paikos get bribed to bring that blatantly-fake case?

Bharani Padmanabhan MD PhD is a multiple sclerosis neurologist who treated patients in the Boston area till July 12, 2017, the day the board stole his license on behalf of competitors. scleroplex@gmail.com