Don't Let This One Slip Off Your Screen
The medical/legal fraud perpetrated on entire industries in America must
not be allowed to slip from the public view. The disgraceful conduct of
lawyers, judges and doctors which has destroyed several viable industries
continues,
with white-out correction in the documents being the only difference
between
asbestosis claims and now, silicosis claims. A significant number of the
plaintiffs, lawyers and doctors are in the same attack mode, using
identical
tactics on a different industry.
And we are clucking our tongues about ENRON?
Please read and contemplate the enormity of this fraud.
March 13, 2006; Page A18, Wall Street Journal
The silicosis lawsuit scandal rolled into Congress last week, and it was
quite the spectacle. The highlight was the sight of three doctors raising
their
right hands to swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and then taking
nothing but the Fifth Amendment.
Ray Harron, Andrew Harron and James Ballard were three of the dozen doctors
singled out last summer by federal Judge Janis Graham Jack for supporting
10,000 phony silicosis claims that she said had been "manufactured for
money."
Her opinion piqued the interest of House Oversight and Investigations
Subcommittee Chairman Ed Whitfield, who invited the doctors to testify as
part of a
probe into public health and legal fraud.
The doctors declined to appear voluntarily, so they were subpoenaed. They
still haven't provided documents to the committee, and in the hearing last
week
all three were lawyered up and hunkered down. You can decide what this says
about their honesty, or their potential vulnerability before the federal
grand jury now probing sham diagnoses.
The dumbstruck docs were a lot more energetic when it came to their
assembly-line diagnosis of both asbestosis and silicosis, a disease caused
by
exposure to silica particles found in construction materials. For their
effort, they
were paid millions of dollars by X-ray screening companies hired by
plaintiff lawyers. The Manville Trust -- one of the largest asbestos
funds --
recently disclosed new statistics about the doctors who have sent the most
such
business its way
..
Ray Harron tops every category, having personally diagnosed disease in
51,048 Manville claims. He also supplied 88,258 reports in support of other
claims. And he made it a trifecta by diagnosing more claimants in one day
than
anyone else: 515 people on November 21, 1994, or the equivalent of more
than
one a minute in an eight-hour shift.
Dr. Ballard also ranks high, having provided 10,700 primary diagnoses, and
a
further 30,329 reports in support of claims. Though Dr. Ballard's all-time
daily high is a mere 297, these guys must be truly gifted diagnosticians.
One doctor who did find his voice before Congress last week was George
Martindale. He had found silicosis in more than 3,600 plaintiffs in the
Jack
litigation, only to admit later that he didn't even know the criteria for
diagnosing the disease. He had included in his reports a standard paragraph
provided
by the X-ray screening company (N&M) that had hired him, and Dr. Martindale
said he only found out later that lawyers had submitted the claims listing
him
as the principal diagnosing physician. Dr. Martindale told the committee
that he thought he was merely providing a "second opinion" on people Ray
Harron
had already diagnosed.
If you're beginning to feel a little slimy just reading this, we know how
you feel. N&M's owner, Heath Mason, told the committee that the boilerplate
legal language he gave Dr. Martindale had in turn been provided to him by a
Texas law firm, Campbell, Cherry, which had also explained to Mr. Mason
that it
"needed a different doctor" than Dr. Harron to sign off on the diagnoses.
Why?
Mr. Mason didn't say, but one guess is that Dr. Harron was by then under
scrutiny for his volume of asbestosis and silicosis diagnoses.
Mr. Mason also admitted that "a lot" of plaintiff law firms would pay him
only if he provided positive diagnoses, and that the lawyers had to
"approve"
any doctor he retained for the diagnostic job. The lawyers seem to have
known
precisely who they could count on for their diagnostic dirty work. Mr.
Mason
also disclosed that law firms such as Campbell, Cherry would send him what
he called their "inventory" of asbestos plaintiffs for N&M to then also
"screen" for silicosis. Never mind that it is rare for any patient to have
both
illnesses -- a point that helped cause Judge Jack to suspect that something
was
rotten in her courtroom.
Mr. Whitfield is far from done. His committee has sent letters to 13 law
firms seeking information about their financial arrangements and
interactions
with doctors and screening companies. It'll be instructive to see if they
too
exercise their right against self-incrimination.
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