The Nation - News from Feb. 13, 1987

Disciplining doctors for fraud or incompetence is difficult because many state medical boards are backlogged, sometimes with hundreds of cases, as investigators juggle up to 70 active investigations, a new report says. Most troubling is the boards’ resulting inability to “help abate the flood of malpractice cases,” says the report, written by the inspector general’s office of the Health and Human Services Department. The report, published in today’s Journal of the American Medical Assn., suggests giving boards more legal power and money, perhaps by raising doctors’ annual license-renewal fees to $500, almost 10 times their 1985 average of $51.