“Greed, also known as avarice or covetousness, is the immoderate desire for earthly goods, as well as situations such as power. It is a sin of excess.”
After reading a recent story about 56-year old Dr. Emma Poroger, I have to wonder, just how greedy can someone be?
Here’s a New York doctor who wasn’t happy with just having a family practice. Nope. She, along with 11 other health-care professionals were recently indicted for their roles in separate schemes which resulted in more than $95 million of fraudulent billings being submitted to Medicare.
Dr. Poroger purported to provide IV vitamin infusion therapy, sleep studies, nerve conduction tests and duplex scans that weren’t medically necessary and never provided. She alone allegedly submitted more than $13 million of false claims to the program.
What’s interesting is that in 1979 a lawsuit filed by the American Medical Association sought and obtained an injunction to keep secret just how much money physicians received from Medicare. At the time, the court said that a doctor’s privacy trumped the public’s interest in knowing how tax dollars are spent. Well, the Wall Street Journal’s publisher, Dow Jones & Co., filed court papers last year and got the injunction overturned.
Dr Poroger’s attorney said, “It’s a sad day when [helping chronically ill patients] is a crime in America.” I think it’s a crime to bilk a system, clearly with no ability to oversee these excesses, out of over $95,000,000!
