Medicare Hire Gone Before He Even Started

The doctor is out. But was he ever in?

On Friday, surgeon Brian W. Amy appeared to have engineered an improbable move from being Mississippi's embattled top health official to overseeing efforts to improve quality of care in the federal Medicare program.

Amy "has extensive experience enforcing health regulations, and managing an enormous annual budget and a staff of over 2100 employees," said an e-mail sent Friday to staffers in the Office of Clinical Standards and Quality. It came from Barry M. Straube, chief medical officer of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, part of the Department of Health and Human Services. Amy was to start on July 23.

Yesterday, however, the prognosis for the doctor's federal career took a decided turn for the worse, after press inquiries about his troubled tenure in Mississippi. The state legislature ousted Amy last month amid reports of lax enforcement of restaurant health violations, failure to warn of disease outbreaks and other problems.

"Dr. Brian Amy is not coming to work for CMS," spokesman Jeff Nelligan said in a terse statement that he said had been approved by the agency's lawyers. "CMS does not comment on personnel matters."

Amy's managerial woes should have come as no surprise. The Jackson Clarion-Ledger chronicled them last year in a three-part investigative series titled "Public Health: Protect or Neglect?" Amy could not be reached yesterday.

James Bonney, a former executive with the Mississippi Hospitality and Restaurant Association and a critic of Amy, said yesterday that he was "flabbergasted" when he heard the physician had landed a job at CMS. "He's not an administrator of any type for any role and any function," Bonney said. "He totally tore apart an existing agency that was doing well."

-- Christopher Lee