Joseph Rugg's Health Law Blog

“The charges in this case are deeply troubling,” U.S. Attorney Dettelbach said. “Inflating Medicare billings alone would be bad enough. Falsifying cardiac care records, making an unnecessary referral for open heart surgery and performing needless and sometimes invasive heart tests and procedures is inconsistent with not only federal law but a doctor’s basic duty to his patients.”

“This doctor violated the sacred trust between doctor and patient by ordering unnecessary tests, procedures and surgeries to line his pockets,” Special Agent Anthony said. “He ripped off taxpayers and put patients’ lives at risk.”

Just another case where greed coupled with disregard for his patients’ welfare led a physician to commit fraud on the government and commercial insurers and to forsake his Hippocratic oath to do no harm.  Here, the physician not only ordered unnecessary and more invasive procedures than the patient needed but also falsified nuclear test results to justify the unnecessary procedures.

While there is no way to prevent greed like this (other than locking the bastards up), I have predicted in other posts that the migration of medical reimbursement from procedure based to quality of care of the patient will reduce the incentive to perform unnecessary tests and hopefully reduce this kind of fraudulent activity.