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My Story |
My name is Teresa Ignasiak and I am the wife of Dr Robert Ignasiak who was convicted in November 2008 of illegally prescribing and health care fraud. My husband was sentenced to 24 years in Federal Prison. Please read the story by Docskid which is our daughter for a background of how this nightmare came to pass. As for me I want to tell any doctor who may be reading this what to expect should the FBI and DEA get you in their cross hairs. I want you to prepare for the worst but hope for the best. Keep in mind that my husband practiced for over 20 years in a small rural town and was the only doctor in that town for most of those years. He was never sued, never had his medical license sanctioned, nor his DEA license restricted. He was beloved by his patients and was a compassionate and dedicated physician. The following is a brief scenario of how things usually go down once you are the target of the governments “War on Doctors”.
1. The FBI will use your charts against you. Agents who are not qualified to make medical decisions will look at your charts and pull many out claiming that you were not acting as a physician, rather a drug dealer.
2. The DEA will pull from local pharmacies only the narcotic prescriptions you have written and make it appear to a jury that you only write narcotics even though they know full well that you write many other scripts that are non-controlled.
3. The DEA will have chain pharmacies such as CVS, Walgreens and Rite-Aid for example, compile a list of patients you have treated that may have moved from the area, or patients you have that may be working out of your area due to these dire economic times. All of these patients will be used against you as the government claims that you are treating patients from “all over” when in reality there is a logical explanation for these out of area filled prescriptions.
4. The government will charge you with health care fraud to not only make you appear greedy and only in it for the money, but to lengthen your sentence if convicted. This does not mean that you were charging for services you did not render, rather, the government will claim that on certain days you were acting as a drug dealer and not a physician.
5. The FBI will interview, interrogate and coerce your patients to testify against you persuading them that you have not been acting in good faith and that you have contributed to the addiction and/or death of former and/or current patients.
6. The FBI will subpoena former employees, disgruntled or cooperative, and persuade them to testify against you. The goal being to support the government’s theory that you ran a “pill mill” and knowingly prescribed to “doctor shoppers” and “drug addicts” with little or no examination.
7. The government will convince a jury that the combination of two or more controlled substances, i.e. hypnotics, anti-anxiety or pain relievers are a “drug cocktail” used only to addict your patients in order to keep them coming back for your financial gain.
8. The government will blame you for any deaths regardless of the cause, convincing the jury that an overdose was your fault, not the patients. Toxicology results will be used against you even if the results are within the normal range. The government will use expert witnesses in addiction, pain management and pharmacology to claim that every medical decision you made was somehow incorrect and outside the usual course of the medical standard. This will include charts in the indictment and others that the judge will allow in to prejudice the jury against you. These same expert witnesses are used over and over by the government with great success.
9. The government will blame you for the increase in the crime rate, if any, for traffic accidents, and possibly blame you for addicting your entire community. (These statements are so incredibly ludicrous but actually made in my husband’s case)
10. If the government decides to proceed with your arrest, the first you will know of it is when your home is surrounded and you find yourself in handcuffs in the back of an unmarked car. Your bank accounts will already have been frozen without your knowing it. From then on you will have to ask the judge to release funds to even pay your bills, not to mention your astronomical legal fees. You will be required to provide a spread sheet of expenses for the prosecutor to approve. Then and only then will your own money be granted as a monthly allowance to pay your bills.
11. The judge may grant bond, but because the charges are so severe, you will find yourself wearing a GPS tracking device at a cost to you of approximately $600 per month. Your passport must be surrendered and you must be in your home between the hours of 10PM and 6AM.
12. Finally, your patients charts will be rummaged through and their privacy violated with no consequences. The doctor patient privilege is a myth and simply does not exist where the government is concerned. Your patients will more than likely be unable to obtain copies of their medical records and after your trial, the records will never be seen again.
Friends, this is how our nightmare unfolded. My husband was indicted on 20 charts out of over 3, 000. Only ONE of those patients testified against him, then she wrote a letter to the judge to beg for leniancy at his sentencing. The government almost always wins. They hold all the cards. My loving and wonderful husband and father of my 4 children has been taken from his family. He has been rewarded for a lifetime of service to others by a harsh prison sentence for simply doing his job. He is innocent of any wrongdoing. He has broken NO laws. He was a good doctor who believed those patients suffering from chronic pain deserved to be treated compassionately and humanely. Unfortunately, a handful of liars and “doctor shoppers” abused his trust and he is paying the price for their dishonesty. No doctor should be held responsible for the unlawful behaviour of those who abuse their medication and the trust of their physician. The American people need to wake up and take a stand against these federal drug vigilantes who have been targeting, arresting and convicting doctors not only in the panhandle of Florida, but all over the United States. As baby boomers age, more and more of us become riddled with illnesses that require pain medication. At the rate the government is convicting caring and compassionate doctors, there will be no one willing to risk his freedom and his families financial security to alleviate their suffering. The risk is too great even now. We must put the practice of medicine back in the hands of doctors not federal agents. My family needs our dad back home where he belongs. Our hearts are broken. My husband is only 54 years old. |
