Orthopedic Surgeons’ Buck-raking Exposed

Nearly 50 orthopedic surgeons, many affiliated with the nation’s top teaching hospitals, each earned over $1 million a year in consulting contracts and royalties from the five companies that make artificial knees and hips. The payment disclosures were posted on the companies’ websites last week as part of a $311 million anti-kickback settlement between four of the firms and the U.S. attorney for northern New Jersey. The complaint had accused the companies of using consulting contracts as an illegal kickback scheme to get surgeons to use a particular company’s artificial joints.

The top two earners were Thomas Thornhill, chair of the orthopedics department Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, and Robert Scott, also at Brigham and Women’s, who each collected $6.7 million in the first ten months of 2007 from DuPuy Orthopaedics, a unit of Johnson & Johnson. In a statement released Friday, the two men claimed the money came consulting fees and from patent royalties on an artificial knee licensed to J&J in 1986 and an artificial hip licensed to J&J in 1991. They said in a prepared statement that they collected no royalties on DuPuy products used at their hospital, and all the consulting fees were donated to charity.

Norman Scott of the Insall Scott Kelly Institute for Orthopaedics and Sports Medicine in Manhattan collected $5.5 million in payments so far in 2007 or about $25,000 a day from Zimmer Inc. The institute’s website claims an affiliation with the Albert Einstein School of Medicine, but the Yeshiva University affiliate says Scott’s appointment ended in 2005. A secretary at the institute refused to comment or put a call through to Scott. Richard H. Rothman of the Rothman Institute, the former chairman of the orthopedics department at the Thomas Jefferson Medical School in Philadelphia, received $2.4 million in 2007 or about $12,000 a day from Stryker, a division of Howmedica Osteonics Corp. A spokesman for the institute, contacted Sunday, refused to comment.

With seniors accounting for nearly 70 percent of the knee and hip replacement market, Medicare spent $16 billion on the procedures last year. A typical knee replacement costs $33,000, according to Medicare records. A spokesman for Christopher J. Christie, the U.S. attorney in Newark, said the investigation into the alleged kickback scheme is ongoing.

The preceding first appeared in Integrity in Science Watch, a publication of the Center for Science in the Public Interest.