Will Greed lead to Meltdown of the Health System?

Where does the greed lie perhaps might be the question. Today it takes a lot of money to create a new drug and as we have seen from the new approach from the FDA, more information and documentation is required. Investors want a return on some of the biotech research that has not quite matured yet, and there are some that are successful and some that close up and go away, leaving all the money invested pretty much gone, almost like a roll of the dice at the craps table sometimes and is now beginning to affect the venture capital side of the business.

Hospitals, is it greed or sometimes survival, or a bit of both? In the news this year it was uncovered that hospitals in the Los Angeles area were preying on the homeless, again to keep money rolling in where the funds are diminishing or to pad some pockets too along the way?

50% of the hospitals in the US border on insolvency, while others are doing better, but, even the larger facilities have been reporting of late that their budgets too are being cut, purchases of MRI machines have been put on hold as an example.

Consumers still continue to do battle with insurance carriers for their healthcare, insurers with big stashes of “reserve” funds set aside for lawsuits and what ever other means they feel they need to have on hand, big funds.

Greed in some areas, maybe survival in other areas, but as transparency continues to grow we will more than likely be hearing about more of these types of stories. We certainly can’t stand to have a total melt down in healthcare, but there are signals and have been for a while now that this may be the road we are headed toward, and thus whistleblowers and algorithms still continue to be 2 of the hottest areas today in healthcare that affects the way everything else works down the line. BD

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Doctors and nurses are alarmed. Medicine is being plundered by giants like Health Corporation of America (HCA), Community Health Systems (CHS) Tenet, Texas Health Systems, and Humana.

Congressional testimony highlighted in Michael Moore’s film Sicko showed doctors, including former Humana executive Dr. Linda Peeno, detailing precisely how HMO greed strands millions of Americans without decent healthcare, leading to immense suffering and excess deaths.

The problem of hospital greed is worsening, according to a growing number of lawsuits from Doctors and nurses. In many cases, the hospital greed appears to be aided and abetted by the justice department, and by powerful connections to politicians such as former Senate Majority Leader William Frist.

Dr. Lokesh B. Vuyyuru has filed whistleblower charges against John Randolph Medical Center at Hopewell, Virginia (an HCA affiliate) and Southside Regional Medical Center at Petersburg, Virginia Community Health Systems (a CHS affiliate) and DR. Gopinath Jadhav, for performing thousands of unwarranted GI procedures, costing millions and leading to needless pain and suffering.These hospitals were responsible numerous patient deaths. CHS has already paid more than $ 31 Million in fines for false claims made to the federal government. In eye-popping pleadings, Dr. Vuyyuru, a leading gastroenterologist and former Fellow of the National institutes of Health (NIH) details the extreme retaliation that HCA used to attempt to silence him. Death threats, and threats to his family, forced Dr. Vuyyuru to send his family out of the country at the height of the dispute.

Dr. Vuyyuru is supported by a large number of doctors coalitions, and whistleblower coalitions, including the Semmelweis Society and the International Association of Whistleblowers (IAW). His case is very similar to that of Dr. Campbell, who exposed a huge scheme of unnecessary heart surgeries in Redding California. Dr. Larry Poliner in Dallas Texas is another doctor who showed HMO mendacity and fraud."

Two whistleblowers, Mr. John Schilling and James Alderson, won the largest fraud cases in history against HCA, resulting in return of more than $1.7 Billion by HCA to the US treasury. Nurses at HCA, alarmed by increasing corruption and poor patient care, have recently started a website to alert the public, and join in solidarity with the doctors and accounting whistleblowers from HCA.

"Whistleblowers could have prevented the meltdown of our mortgage system," continued McCray. "There is nothing more precious than health. We need to listen to Schilling, Alderson, the HCA nurses and courageous doctors like Vuyyuru, Poliner, Peeno and Campbell.

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