Where’s The Outrage?
April 7, 2009
Today’s Wall Street Journal makes a great point: why is prosecution so slow in coming after very clear evidence of fraud in asbestos-related cases?
It took New York State’s Board for Professional Medical Conduct nearly four years to revoke the license of Dr. Ray Harron after a Texas judge ruled that he had given fraudulent diagnoses – over 51,000 – of silicosis and asbestos-related disease to plaintiffs in pending litigation. When called to testify before Congress on this, Dr. Harron took the Fifth Amendment. So it’s good that New York is finally catching up to the other states that have revoked his license, though they made up for their delay a bit by noting that ‘[Dr. Harron] was part of an operation to find plaintiffs with silicosis whether or not they really had silicosis. This is perpetrating a fraud on the courts.”
It’s a fraud on medicine, too. Do you really want your doctor taking the Fifth?
The Journal is right to call on both the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York and on New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo to investigate this – as he did with the Wall Street Bonuses – and to follow up with prosecutions, when the evidence of guilt and of fraudulent conduct is so clear. But the investigation shouldn’t just stop with the doctors; it needs to go further, to the trial lawyers who may have directed the doctors’ conduct.
After all, fraud is fraud, whether it’s Bernie Madoff, a doctor who gives fraudulent diagnoses for pay, or the trial lawyer who offers the pay.