Mm, Mm Good

Cook said, "This case is unique in that multiple times this board has instructed Dr. Rajanna on the deficiencies of his clinic. The board doesn't have the resources to visit each doctor's office once a month to make sure they're cleaning." She added that Rajanna should hire professional pest control and cleaning companies and, as a practicing physician, should know how to properly dispose of medical waste. She said Rajanna was violating state law regarding labeling medications, which requires that labels include the drug's name, the name of its manufacturer, its lot number, its strength and quantity, and its expiration date.

After the hearing, Welsch ordered that Rajanna's license remain suspended for 30 days to give the board a chance to review his case. Following another postponement in April, the board revoked Rajanna's license this past weekend.

During the Board of Healing Arts proceedings against Rajanna, no mention was made of the allegations that the doctor had eaten fetuses. When the Pitch asked why, Buening said the board had been unable to substantiate the charges in interviews with 17 witnesses. "Anybody who it was alleged had any information in regard to the situation was contacted," Buening says. "Any allegations that were made, we pursued. The charges we were left with were only the ones we felt we could prove."

The same day of Rajanna's hearing, the Kansas House of Representatives passed the abortion-clinic-licensing bill by what supporters called a "veto-proof" margin of 88 to 34. The state Senate had already approved the bill by more than a two-thirds margin with a vote of 27 to 12. If no legislators changed their votes, it looked like a veto could be overridden.

Two weeks later, on April 15, Gov. Sebelius vetoed the bill, as she had said she would. "Once again in 2005, the Legislature has chosen pure politics over good policy, has rejected uniform standards for all procedures, and has instead chosen to regulate only one procedure -- abortion," Sebelius said in a statement she released that day.

On April 28, legislators in the House tried to override the veto but failed by two votes. "We were a little worried, but in the end the vote came out exactly as we expected it to," Mackey says.

If the Rajanna investigation had helped boost the bill's chances, his disciplining, some say, helped sink it.

Kansans for Life's Ostrowski accuses the board of politically motivated timing. It was no accident, she says, that the Board of Healing Arts finally suspended Rajanna's license the same day the Legislature voted on the licensing bill.

But Stafford, the board's attorney, dismisses the connection. "Politics, I don't think that had anything to do with it," he says. "The board meets only six times a year, and they can only take final actions at those times. It came up as the result of a completed investigation, and I think there was just a lot of coincidence there."

The investigation took a long time, Buening says, because the board's seven investigators are stretched thin, with about 700 cases open at any one time. (Not all open cases require full investigations, however.) He says the board is considering revising its procedures in order to complete urgent investigations faster.

"I think in hindsight now it's, Gosh, I wish we would have gotten that done a little faster than what we did," Buening says.

Rajanna has moved out of the building on Central Avenue and does not plan to go back. He hired an attorney in May, and he can appeal his license revocation to the district court. He says he is a good surgeon and has had a very low rate of complications. "If there's any way we can make them understand the truth, it's what I want to do," Rajanna says.

Rajanna says he was offering a service to the community by providing abortions at a lower price than other area clinics. "We were helping the women in the community. The hugs that I get is enough reward," he says.