Health Care Corruption No Longer a Taboo Topic?

We have been going on about the ruinous effects of health care corruption, the role of impunity in enabling worsening corruption, our lack of good ways to challenge these problems, and our ongoing inability to even discuss what amounts to taboo topics (which we dubbed the "anechoic effect.") But as  corruption, and crime are increasingly linked to the most powerful leaders in the US, it becomes harder to deny that we have a huge problem with corruption in general, and thus maybe it becomes harder to deny we have a huge problem with health care corruption (see also our posts on conflicts of interest, crime, and specifically bribery, extortion, fraud, and kickbacks in health care.)

US Governmental Corruption in the Headlines

Last month we noted that mainstream media are now beginning to discuss how the US has a history of not adequately investigating corruption, and has developed a culture of impunity that is fostering corruption.

Yesterday, the Washington Post reported that 200 US Representatives (all Democrats) filed a lawsuit charging the President of the US with accepting emoluments (payments or gifts meant to influence him, that is, the moral equivalent of bribes) from foreign governments, and charged that this violated the US Constitution.  While there is controversy about whether these lawmakers have the "standing" to pursue this lawsuit, at least some legal scholars insisted that it is corruption that is at issue:

Legal scholars consulted by the congressional plaintiffs said their complaint is distinctive because of the special standing granted to Congress.

'The Framers of our Constitution gave members of Congress the responsibility to protect our democracy from foreign corruption by determining which benefits the president can and cannot receive from a foreign state,' said Erwin Chemerinsky, the incoming dean of the law school at the University of California at Berkeley.

'When the president refuses to reveal which benefits he is receiving — much less obtain congressional consent before accepting them — he robs these members of their ability to perform their constitutional role,' Chemerinsky said. 'Congressional lawmakers . . . have a duty to preserve the constitutional order in the only way they can: by asking the courts to make the President obey the law.'

The same article noted that this is just the latest lawsuit on this matter:

News of the lawsuit emerged less than 24 hours after attorneys general in the District and Maryland, both Democrats, filed suit alleging that payments to Trump violated the Constitution’s anti-corruption clauses. In another lawsuit filed against Trump by business competitors, the Justice Department recently defended Trump’s actions, arguing that he violated no restrictions by accepting fair-market payments for services.

That article also explained that the lawsuit was about corruption, albeit not in so many words.

The conflicts created are so vast, Frosh said, that Americans cannot say with certainty whether Trump’s actions on a given day are taken in the best interest of the country or that of his companies.

'Constituents must know that a president who orders our sons and daughters into harm’s way is not acting out of concern for his own business,' Frosh said. 'They must know that we will not enter into a treaty with another nation because our president owns a golf course there.'

Recall that Transparency International (TI) defines corruption as

Abuse of entrusted power for private gain

In response to these lawsuits, today an op-ed in the Guardian asserted

We’re now witnessing kleptocracy on an unprecedented scale in America. And there’s barely even a fig leaf of cover. Trump has openly enmeshed his private financial interests in national policy. To say that this creates an appearance of corruption would be far too polite. This is the real deal: sketchy dealings all the way down.

Health Care Beginning to be Characterized by the Taboo Word "Corruption"  


Meanwhile, much more quietly, people in health care are starting to talk more openly about the possibility that health care corruption is as real a problem as government corruption.  Last November, I attended the first academic conference explicitly about health care corruption, albeit in Canada.  In May, I was on a panel at a plenary session entitled "Corruption and Patient Harm in the Medical-Industrial Complex" at the Lown Institute/ RightCare Conference in the Boston area (agenda here).

Late in May, the leaders of the Lown Institute and RightCare (Vikas Saini and Shannon Brownlee) published an article in the Huffington Post entitled, "Corrupt Health Care Practices Drive Up Costs And Fail Patients." The authors asserted:

'Corruption' is not a term most Americans would probably apply to what goes on inside American health care. But if corruption is defined as persons or institutions wielding power for their own gain, then our health care system is riddled with it. And it is not only costing us billions of dollars, it is harming untold numbers of patients like Ralph Weiss. Examples abound.

Also late in May, the Hastings Report included an article entitled "Closed Financial Loops: When They Happen in Government, They're Called Corruption; in Medicine, They're Just a Footnote" by Kevin De Jesus-Morales, and Vinay Prasad. The authors accused the medical profession from hiding true corruption in the guise of manageable conflicts of interest, per the abstract:

Many physicians are involved in relationships that create tension between a physician's duty to work in her patients’ best interest at all times and her financial arrangement with a third party, most often a pharmaceutical manufacturer, whose primary goal is maximizing sales or profit. Despite the prevalence of this threat, in the United States and globally, the most common reaction to conflicts of interest in medicine is timid acceptance. There are few calls for conflicts of interest to be banned, and, to our knowledge, no one calls for conflicted practitioners to be reprimanded. Contrast our attitudes in medicine with public attitudes toward financial conflicts among government employees. When enforcement of rules against conflict of interest slackens in the public sector, news organizations investigate and publish their criticism. Yet even when doctors are quoted in the media promoting specific drugs, their personal financial ties to the drug maker are rarely mentioned. Policies for governmental employees are strict, condemnation is strong, and criminal statutes exist (allowing for corruption charges). Yet the evidence that conflict is problematic is, if anything, stronger in medicine than in the public sector. Policies against conflicts of interest in medicine should be at least as strong as those already existing in the public sector.

I will just ignore the irony presented by our apparent inability so far to actually affect what appears to be massive corruption affecting the current US government.

Summary

We live in perilous times, but at least people are starting to recognize some perils, rather than hiding them with euphemisms or treating their very mention as taboo.  If the US republican experiment survives, at least maybe we can learn from the experience to address conflicts of interest, crime, and corruption in spheres outside of government, particularly health care.

 So to repeat an ending to one of my previous posts on health care corruption....  if we really want to reform health care, in the little time we may have before our health care bubble bursts, we will need to take strong action against health care corruption.  Such action will really disturb the insiders within large health care organizations who have gotten rich from their organizations' misbehavior, and thus taking such action will require some courage.  Yet such action cannot begin until we acknowledge and freely discuss the problem.  The first step against health care corruption is to be able to say or write the words, health care corruption.