Medicaid: Modest Fees, Large Returns

When U.S. Senate investigators looked into the costs of Medicaid for the poor, they discovered payments to individual doctors running into five or six figures for a single year. Michigan's Medicaid program had paid $169,000 to Dr. Sanford Polansky, of Benton Harbor, for 1968. His case, along with the names of 80 other physicians who had collected more than $25,000 each, were in the records of Michigan Blue Shield, which serves as Medicaid's fiscal agent in the state.

Blue Shield published the information. The result, says Polansky, was "an enormous amount of crank-letter harassment" as well as "slanted and distorted...