2 DOCS CHARGED IN OPIOID CRACKDOWN: Two Baltimore-area doctors flooded Maryland streets with more than a quarter-million doses of illegally prescribed painkillers and sedatives in recent years, compounding the state’s opioid epidemic,investigators said Thursday. The doctors have been indicted on charges of selling prescriptions for cash, Tim Prudente reports for the Sun. Attorney General Brian E. Frosh said. “We hope they’re outliers. Unfortunately, the evidence in Maryland and around the country [is] there are others like them.”
Rachel Baye of WYPR-FM reports that law enforcement officials say Kofi Shaw-Taylor illegally billed Medicaid and accepted cash for prescriptions at clinics in Glen Burnie and Baltimore. He faces 289 counts of charges that include conspiracy to commit drug distribution and Medicaid fraud. Officials say Hasan Babaturk, a doctor in Bel Air, met patients on the street and made house calls to illegally sell opioid painkillers.
2 INSURERS LEFT IN HEALTH EXCHANGE: The Maryland Health Connection, the state’s online health insurance market or “exchange” under the Affordable Care Act, will have just two companies offering individual health coverage for 2018, while much of Maryland will have only one choice from the two, writes Vic Simon for The Sentinel newspapers.
FROSH ASKED TO RECUSE SELF: Del. Haven Shoemaker and 20 of his Republican colleagues in the House of Delegates have signed a letter to Attorney General Brian Frosh asking that he recuse himself from a court case involving alleged gerrymandering, John Kelvey of the Carroll County Times reports. They argue it is inappropriate for Frosh to defend the redistricting plan given his past role in the Democratic Senate leadership — Frosh served on the Senate Committee on Reapportionment and Redistricting before being elected attorney general in 2014.
