Malpractice is nothing more than a medical mistake that harms a patient. Hundreds of times worse are doctors who lie, cheat and steal from their patients and from the rest of us who pay taxes to support Medicare and other government programs. Every day there is doctor fraud in this country. Unfortunately, it is not every day that one of these cheaters gets caught. Last week one of those days came for some crooked doctors and their hospital partners in Southern California.
Just before Thanksgiving, the Department of Justice announced that the former Chief Financial Officer of a Long Beach hospital, two orthopedic surgeons, a chiropractor and a marketer who worked for the Long Beach hospital in question and two other hospitals had all been indicted for their participation in “long-running health care fraud schemes.” The Pacific Hospital in Long Beach paid out millions of dollars to doctors, chiropractors and others to refer their patients to Pacific Hospital where one of the orthopedic surgeons would perform spine surgery on the patients. According to the Justice Department, over $580,000,000 in bills were fraudulently submitted to the federal government and to California’s worker’s compensation system. Hawaiian Gardens Hospital was also involved in paying kickbacks. All of these defendants have pleaded guilty and agreed to cooperate with the government in pursuing others involved in their schemes. Each of them also faces a possible prison term.
“The members of this scheme treated injured workers and their spines as commodities, to be traded away to the highest bidder,” said U.S. Attorney Eileen M. Decker of the Central District of California. “This investigation should send a message to the entire industry: patients are not for sale.”
Under the scheme, patients were referred to the hospitals and the surgeons in on the scheme from long distances for surgeries many of them did not need. This from the FBI’s Los Angeles Field Office, “The defendants carried out this elaborate scheme by callously gathering patients, remaining indifferent to patient needs, and greedily lining their pockets with a cut of the cash from taxpayer-funded health care systems.” From the California Insurance Commissioner, “Injured workers were treated like livestock by doctors and hospitals who paid or accepted kickbacks and bribes in exchange for referrals. Injured workers are put at risk when their medical treatment is based on kickbacks and bribes instead of their medical needs.”
Appropriately, this story makes numerous references to the health care “industry” because that is exactly what it is. Our “fee for service” system under which doctors get paid only if they do something to you tempts doctors to order tests you don’t need or to do operations you don’t need. This is a big business with millions of dollars changing hands on a daily basis. The doctors know this. The hospitals know this. About the only person who does not know this is the poor patient. And woe betide the poor patient if he or she gets injured by the unscrupulous doctor or hospital. That’s when the doctors and hospitals start to talk about greedy patients suing and making things worse for everyone else. And guess what? Juries buy this and send the injured patient home with nothing while the doctor and hospital go back to counting their money.
Medicine is a business. Don’t forget it. Be a wary and informed consumer. Don’t be like the poor patients who were treated like livestock in California and received operations they didn’t need.
