06.30.09
In Search of Integrity
There should be a litmus test for ethics and integrity so that the landscape of our country could look vastly different. There would be no healthcare crisis, no financial collapse, no housing foreclosures or unnecessary deaths because of pain medication addiction. The misfits seeking positions of power would be duly eliminated before they created havoc.
The death of Michael Jackson documented an ever expanding reality that gives me great pain: some doctors will do anything for the pursuit of money, even at the expense of human life.
During the course of my medical career, I have witnessed and have had to report colleagues who have crossed the line for the sake of their bank accounts. The colleague who supplied his cocaine habit by doing unnecessary surgery and fraudulent Medicaid billing. The physician who paid his cronies on a per-patient-basis and turned a public funded healthcare facility into a money making factory. The “deals” made by colleagues that violate conflicts of interests. Hippocrates is probably rolling over in his grave.
I will not write fictitious sick notes, fraudulent disability claims, fill prescriptions for people without a medical chart and am fiercely protective of my DEA license. My medical degree is not for sale. There are times when I have not been the most popular physician among my colleagues but at least I can sleep at night. I wonder if the physicians of Heath Ledger, Anna Nicole Smith and Michael Jackson can do the same.
The seduction of money comes with a heavy price. Just ask Michael Millikan, Ivan Boesky, or perhaps, the clients of Bernie Madoff. Dr. Deepak Chopra had the courage to say “no” to Michael Jackson, despite his celebrity. I only wish more of my colleagues would have the decency to do the same.
06.14.09
A Masterpiece of Deception
How many times has the AMA betrayed physicians? Oh, let me count the ways. In 1992, they cut a deal with managed care industries and left us hanging to dry. Then they allowed our identity as physicians to disappear by calling us “providers”; poured salt into our wounds by supporting the notion that primary care physicians be replaced by advanced nurse practitioners, (thus inciting an unnecessary turf war); kept their mouths shut when “retail” clinics emerged like mushrooms manned by people who know very little about medical practice; and now rejected the progressive idea of public health insurance in support of the for-profit insurance companies. Excuse me while I remove the knife from my weary back. The lobbyists have struck again.
Without a public health component or regulatory oversight of private insurance companies, the healthcare industry is headed off the cliff. Haven’t we learned from the debacle on Wall Street? Contrary to what we would love to believe, insurance companies do NOT do the right thing when no one is looking. Just ask whistle-blower, Dr. Linda Peeno, what anguish she encountered after Humana asked her to deny a young patient a heart transplant. http://www.pnhp.org/news/2002/may/damaged_care_premi.php Or read about the FBI’s investigation of Well Care Insurance because of Medicaid fraud. http://http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124153953103687873.html
Yes, former NY governor Elliot Spitzer might have had a few indiscretions but he DID keep white collar criminals in check. Do you really think it’s a coincidence that Spitzer was in the midst of an investigation of AIG fraud and then ended up on a media radar screen? Pulleeze.
So here’s an example of what the average insurance CEO earns while the rest of our healthcare industry is in shambles:
• H. Edward Hanway, Chair/ CEO, Cigna Corp, $30.16 million
• David B. Snow, Jr, Chair/ CEO, Medco Health, $21.76 million
• Michael B. MCallister, CEO, Humana Inc, $20.06 million
• Stephen J. Hemsley, CEO, UnitedHealth Group, $13,164,529
• Angela F. Braly, President/ CEO, Wellpoint, $9,094,771
• Dale B. Wolf, CEO, Coventry Health Care, $20.86 million
• Jay M. Gellert, President/ CEO, Health Net, $16.65 million
• William C. Van Faasen, Chairman, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts, $3 million plus $16.4 million in retirement benefits
• Charlie Baker, President/ CEO, Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, $1.5 million
• James Roosevelt, Jr., CEO, Tufts Associated Health Plans, $1.3 million
• Cleve L. Killingsworth, President/CEO Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts, $3.6 million
• Raymond McCaskey, CEO, Health Care Service Corp (Blue Cross Blue Shield), $10.3 million
• Daniel P. McCartney, CEO, Healthcare Services Group, Inc, $ 1,061,513
• Daniel Loepp, CEO, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan, $1,657,555
• Todd S. Farha, CEO, WellCare Health Plans, $5,270,825
If you think that a private insurance company has YOUR best interest at heart. Please, think again.
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06.04.09
A Deadly Risk
And there it was on the front page of the New York Times for the whole world to see. Where Life Starts Is a Deadly Risk, by Denise Grady, described a harsh reality that is often mentioned as a mere footnote. More than half a million pregnant women die from preventable deaths and over a quarter million occur in Africa. Of course there are not enough financial and human resources available and their stories are disheartening. For each woman who dies, 20 more encounter serious complications. Physicians state that more deaths occur outside the hospital because many try to give birth at home. This leads to my next point.
There are a growing number of women who want to give birth at home alone, without a midwife or birth attendant. I posted a blog about this “unassisted” phenomena a few weeks ago after one of their advocates’ baby ended up dead. I subsequently received a comment from a woman who discussed how “tribal” women would rather deliver without intervention and their biggest obstacle was poverty. Not so. There are millions of African women who would love to trade places with the “unassisted” crowd in a heartbeat. Yes, childbirth is a natural act but it is not exempt from danger.
Grady’s article reads like a litany of horror. A mother of six bled to death because the nurses did not know how to remove the placenta. A mother of quadruplets died leaving four beautiful babies in an orphanage. Two and three laboring women sharing one cot. America, we are so blessed. The cost to run a hospital in Tanzania costs $200,000 a year. I challenge the American College of Obstetricians-Gynecologists (ACOG), the American Board of Obstetrician-Gynecologists (ABOG) and all the rest of the deep-pocket women’s organizations to step up to the plate. We are our sisters’ keepers. When a mother and baby die, the whole world mourns.
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