American Doctors Busted for Fraud, Conspiracy in HIV Treatment Scam

American Doctors Busted for Fraud, Conspiracy in HIV Treatment Scam

(NaturalNews) I've often asserted that doctors exploit people for personal profit, prescribing drugs and procedures that are medically unnecessary while raking in millions from health insurance companies, Medicare and Medicaid. This week, Miami doctor Roberto Rodriguez was sentenced to eight years in prison -- and ordered to pay $9 million back to Medicare -- for doing exactly that.

According to press reports, Dr. Rodriguez conspired with five other medical professionals to recruit patients, diagnose them with HIV, then forge false records for HIV treatment services that earned them millions of dollars in Medicare reimbursements. From October 2003 through February 2006, the team of doctors bilked Medicare (and taxpayers) for $20 million in false claims. (One of the co-conspirators -- Dr. Carmen del Cueto -- will be sentenced in September.)

But here's the best part: This fraud wasn't limited to just one medical clinic. Dr. Rodriguez was the medical director for five additional Miami-based HIV infusion clinics where the same fraud continued to the tune of millions of dollars.

As you learn all this, keep in mind that both of these fraudsters were state-licensed medical doctors, granted the right to prescribe dangerous (even deadly) chemicals to infants, children and senior citizens. These are people who went to medical school, who passed the graduation exams, and who were entrusted with the health of patients by "conventional medicine" licensing boards.

So how, then, could they have been such outrageous criminals, defrauding the taxpayers for millions of dollars while abandoning the real medical needs of their patients?

What's lacking in modern medicine: Ethics
The answer is that medical schools don't teach ethics. In fact, they have no interest in the subject. Med school students don't pursue the profession as a way to "explore the potential of ethical behavior;" they almost always pursue it out of ego and a desire for wealth. (A few exceptional doctors diverge from the majority and pursue it out of a genuine desire to help heal their fellow human beings, but those individuals are rare indeed.)

In our modern society, medicine is pursued primarily for personal profit by even those doctors who operate within the boundaries of the law. So why should we be surprised when two conventional doctors figure out a way to earn huge profits without engaging in any real medicine at all? The behavior, after all, is merely an extension of what they learned in medical school: Treat the symptoms, not the problem. Produce short-term results, not long-term solutions.

Earning "quick cash" is a lot like using pharmaceuticals to produce "quick results." They are shortcuts pursued by doctors with a shortcut mentality -- professionals who lack holistic thinking, who lack ethics, and who lack any real compassion for fellow human beings.

Sadly, these two criminal doctors reflect the dire lack of ethics in many of the physicians in the conventional medical community. This "make a quick buck at any cost" mentality dominates western medicine today, where the very idea of having compassion for a fellow human being is utterly alien to the most successful members of the profession.

SOURCE: NATURAL NEWS

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