WASHINGTON - Payback can be a bitter pill for the nation's deadbeat doctors.
The government has seized tax refunds and unemployment checks, claimed judgments against them in federal court, banned them from billing Medicare and Medicaid, even posted their names on a public shaming list.
Yet 930 medical professionals nationwide remain in default, owing the government more than $116 million for loans many stopped repaying more than 18 years ago. Among them:
-- Detroit dentist Duane Senior, 55, has been on the default list since 1997 and reported owing $651,783 as of Nov. 1. A graduate of Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Tenn., Senior works in a small dental practice.
-- Dr. Larose McCluskey, 61, of Cheney, Wash., an osteopathic doctor who graduated from the Kansas City University of Medicine and Biosciences in 1987, owes the most of anyone on the list -- $933,675. The initial federal claim against her in 1998 was for $222,055. She practiced family medicine in Washington state for about five years and then stopped to raise her four children and become a medical missionary.
-- Dr. Thomas McElhinney, 76, an Elkton, Fla., chiropractor who owes more than $572,900 for his training at Life University in Marietta, Ga. He relinquished his license to practice in 2004 and said he was never able to establish his practice. "Being a chiropractor sounded like a good idea at the time, but I couldn't earn a living at it," he said.
The last loans in the program came in 1998. This year, the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) budgeted $2.8 million for the program, with more than a dozen employees tracking the deadbeat docs and monitoring 30,000 other professionals paying back more than $730 million on time.
The Health Education Assistance Loan (HEAL) program was intended to help keep medical training open to middle-class students starting in 1978.
The money was supposed to be a last resort -- private loans from banks, credit unions and other lenders guaranteed by the federal government to help pay for graduate study for doctors, dentists, optometrists, chiropractors and others. Interest started accruing immediately and ran into double digits for many loans.
Over 20 years, the program loaned $4 billion to about 157,000 students, of whom 95 percent have kept up with payments. Lenders for the minority that did not turned to the government when they couldn't collect. Those defaults forced Congress to appropriate more than $300 million to pay off the loans.
"It's not the government's money, it's the taxpayer's money. People in Washington tend to just let it go out the door and not worry as much about whether it ever gets paid back," said Thomas Schatz, president of the Washington, D.C., watchdog group Citizens Against Government Waste.
The HRSA has not offered a loan-guarantee program for medical education since HEAL loans ended.
Medical-school students today graduate with an average debt of more than $162,000, yet government and school officials say their loan-default rates are only about 1 percent. The overall default rate on all higher education loans is estimated at around 13 percent , according to the U.S. Department of Education.
Although the HRSA says "millions of dollars have been received from defaulters as a result of the activities associated with publicizing their names," 30 percent of the individuals on the default list today were on it in 1995.
Asked to comment on the enduring delinquency, HRSA spokesman David Bowman said in a written statement: "HRSA does not know and cannot speculate why one-third of the defaulted doctors continue on the defaulted doctors list." He declined to allow anyone in the agency to be formally interviewed on camera.
Scripps asked HRSA Administrator Mary Wakefield to comment about the effectiveness of her agency in collecting defaulted HEAL loans as she left a conference on rural health Feb. 4.
She declined to answer, but said she would try to find someone to discuss the program. HRSA officials later repeated their refusal to submit to a formal interview.
Some professionals on the deadbeat list say they didn't intend to default, but were overwhelmed by high interest rates, business mistakes and other debts.
Detroit dentist Senior said he had tried to settle his debt, but "I wasn't able to maintain that obligation." He told Scripps that he stopped practicing for a time and has other federal and state tax obligations.
"It's not really my intention to stick it to the taxpayers. I have made every reasonable effort to try and pay things back. I just haven't been as financially successful as I had hoped to have been," Senior said.
McCluskey, whose Oregon medical license expired in 2006, describes herself on her website and blog as a "board-certified, residency-trained family doc" who "sold my practice and moved out in
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