Gutting the Health Care Corporate Strike Force

Health care corruption is a severe problem in the US, and globally.

For years, we have ranted about the US government's lackadaisical - to use an execessively polite term - approach to wrongdoing by big health care organizations.  The trend really got started back in the day when now Governor Chris Christie (R - NJ), then a federal prosecutor, started making deferred prosecution agreements available to corporations which appeared to have committed white collar crimes.  However, these agreements were originally meant to give young, non-violent first offenders a second chance.

Since then, we have noted the continuing impunity of top health care corporate managers.  Health care corporations have allegedly used kickbacks and fraud to enhance their revenue, but at best such corporations have been able to make legal settlements that result in fines that small relative to their  multibillion revenues without admitting guilt.  Almost never are top corporate managers subject to any negative consequences.

The Health Care Corporate Strike Force

The US Department of Justice during the Obama administration made some modest attempts to decrease such impunity.  One such measure was the formation of a Health Care Corporate Strike Force.

As reported by Law.com,

the strike force was created in the fall of 2015, with five dedicated lawyers working on about a dozen of the most complex corporate fraud cases in the health care space.

Andrew Weissmann, the then-chief of the DOJ’s fraud section, told a health care conference in April 2016 that the section was placing 'a heightened emphasis' on corporate health care fraud investigations. He pointed to the recently established Corporate Fraud Strike Force that he said would focus resources in investigation and prosecution of larger corporate health care law violations, as opposed to smaller groups or individuals.

The Downsizing of the Health Care Corporate Strike Force

But now, after candidate Donald Trump promised to 'drain the swamp,'





and railed against the supposed corruption of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (leading tochants of 'lock her up'), the Trump administration will further diminish this tiny attempt to reduce impunity, the Law.com report stated:

the DOJ, under the Trump administration and new U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, has announced new priorities: violent crime, drugs and illegal immigration.

In restructuring to focus on those priorities, the DOJ has gutted the Health Care Corporate Fraud Strike Force, according to at least two high-level sources who worked at the Justice Department until recently. The sources declined to be named, as being identified could affect their current jobs and clients.

The sources said the strike force has been cut from five full-time lawyers to only two – assistant chief Sally Molloy and trial attorney William Chang. And both are splitting their time in the strike force with other duties.

The DOJ declined an interview request for this story. But DOJ spokesperson Wyn Hornbuckle issued this statement: 'The Health Care Corporate Strike Force, as with the entire health care fraud unit, is going strong under steady leadership—continuing to vigorously investigate and hold accountable individuals and companies that engage in fraud, including tackling an opioid epidemic that claimed 60,000 American lives last year.'

The Task Force had resolved one major case against for-profit hospital chain Tenet.  The Task Force alleged but Tenet actually admitted its

supervisors lied to in-house counsel about the purpose of millions of dollars in contracts, which purportedly were for 'services' but really were bribes and kickbacks to clinics and doctors for sending Medicaid patients to Tenet hospitals.

While its settlement included a non-prosecution agreement, the Task Force actions also resulted in two convictions and a pending indictment of actual people.

Still,

The lawyer openings on the strike force were exacerbated when, on April 14, Sessions imposed a hiring freeze on the DOJ’s Criminal Division as well as on U.S. Attorney Offices, as reported by The New York Times, which obtained a copy of the freeze memo.

Some DOJ lawyers believe, sources said, that white-collar crime and corporate fraud resources are being shifted to cover Sessions’ new priorities of violent crime, drugs and illegal immigration. That emphasis, they said, can be seen in who runs the DOJ’s criminal division.

Under former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, himself a white-collar crime prosecutor and then corporate defense attorney, assistant attorney general Leslie Caldwell led the division. Caldwell specialized in securities fraud and white-collar crime, and had participated in the Enron Corp. prosecution.

Under Sessions, himself a former law and order prosecutor in Alabama, the criminal division now reports to deputy assistant attorney general Kenneth Blanco. Blanco has a long history of bringing cases centered on drugs and violent crime in the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office, in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Southern Florida, and in Main Justice in Washington, D.C., where he served as chief of the narcotic and dangerous drug section at the DOJ.

Discussion

So the Trump administration proposes two part time attorneys to drain the health care corporate swamp.  That seems like bailing out the Titanic with teaspoons. But should we expect anything else from an administration that is being increasingly identified with corruption and impunity itself?

We have frequently discussed outright corruption in health care as one of the most important causes of health care dysfunction.  Transparency International (TI) defines corruption as

Abuse of entrusted power for private gain

In 2006, TI published a report on health care corruption, which asserted that corruption is widespread throughout the world, serious, and causes severe harm to patients and society.

the scale of corruption is vast in both rich and poor countries.

Also,

Corruption might mean the difference between life and death for those in need of urgent care. It is invariably the poor in society who are affected most by corruption because they often cannot afford bribes or private health care. But corruption in the richest parts of the world also has its costs.

The report did not get much attention.  Since then, health care corruption has been nearly a taboo topic in the US.  When health care corruption is discussed in English speaking developed countries, it is almost always in terms of a problem that affects benighted less developed countries.  On Health Care Renewal, we have repeatedly asserted that health care corruption is a big problem in all countries, including the US, but the topic remains anechoic,. presumably mainly because its discussion would offend the people made rich and powerful by corruption.

As suggested by the recent Transparency International report on corruption in the pharmaceutical industry,  there is so much money to be made through pharmaceutical (and by implication, other health care corruption) that the corrupt have the money, power, and resources to protect their wealth accumulation by keeping it obscure.  In the TI Report itself,

However, strong control over key processes combined with huge resources and big profits to be made make the pharmaceutical industry particularly vulnerable to corruption. Pharmaceutical companies have the opportunity to use their influence and resources to exploit weak governance structures and divert policy and institutions away from public health objectives and towards their own profit maximising interests.

I might as well repeat myself once again.  As I wrote in 2015, if we are not willing to even talk about health care corruption, how will we ever challenge it? 

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.

Musical Interlude

What else, the Honey Island Swamp Band, playing "Prodigal Son,"