WILL ROGERS ON THE MOTO OF THE REPUBLICAN PARTY, “BOYS MY BACK IS TURNED”

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Harry Markopolos said the SEC is "captive to the industry it regulates and is afraid" to bring cases against prominent individuals. The same was and still is true of many other regulatory agencies.

"There was an abject failure by the regulatory agencies we entrust as our watchdog."


 "Every bit of information we obtained was in the public domain. We never had any secret insider documents or smoking gun e-mails."

 "What troubles us is that dozens of highly knowledgeable men and women also knew that (Madoff) was a fraud and walked away silently, saying nothing and doing nothing."


This just really bugs the crap out of me. Harry Markopolos informed the Securities and Exchange Commission about Madoff, yet they did nothing and so many people lost their life savings. We have doctors who know a doctor is mentally unstable not take action to not only protect others, but also help that doctor get the help he needs. I guess they did not become doctors because they cared about people or the quality of medical care. We have attorneys who tell lies on top of lies getting people convicted of crimes they did not commit while a law school professor and a judge who sits on a district appeals court render some kind of deranged interpretation of the law resulting in people being tortured and killed. Guess they don't believe in human rights, the constitution, or international law. We had regulating agencies do nothing when informed of the Maddoff scheme including many of his competitors who knew something was seriously wrong with his practices and kept silent about it. Only a couple brave souls reported it which meant they were in danger, because when you piss off those with money and power something really bad can happen to you.

 I found out when I was in New Mexico in 2002 and reported a hospital for double and false billing for Medicaid that the government did not care about corruption. They made lots of excuses and just totally ignored me. Do you think they will get fired for this incompetence? Most likely someone will just say they had "bad judgment". This hospital was pulling another scheme as it turns out which I did not even know about then to the tune of millions of dollars. There was a history of embezzlement there also, when the guy was caught they allowed him to leave the state and no charges were made, I was told it was upwards of $2 million dollars. Most people don't know that on the U.S. side they send ambulances to the border to pick up Mexican citizens who are covered by Medicaid, that makes it easy to scam, they just make up a name and bill the government.  The federal government subsidized the cost of transporting Mexican citizens to this particular hospital one year that I know of for about $200,000. I don't have information for any other years.  A whistleblower is suing them in court and he will most likely get a lot of money. I was not after money, I just wanted them to stop ripping of the U.S. citizens. I tried to report them in 2002 and the whistleblower suit was filed in 2005. They let it go on and most likely on purpose.

John Commins, for HealthLeaders Media, March 18, 2009

It was decades before George W. Bush entered the White House—before he was born, actually—but humorist Will Rogers could have been speaking of the future 43rd president when he reputedly said that the motto of the Republican Party was "Boys, my back is turned."





I was reminded of that with the news last week that the U.S. Justice Department had intervened in a 4-year-old whistleblower suit filed in New Mexico against Franklin, TN-based Community Health Systems Inc.


What's interesting is not so much the content of the suit, but the fact that the Department of Justice has climbed aboard, something that many observers say didn't happen very much in the eight years that Bush occupied the White House.


"The Justice Department has a backlog of some 500-600 whistleblower and false claims cases in the healthcare industry that have not been taken up by the Bush administration," says Bruce Cranner, a board member of the Defense Research Institute, and a partner in the New Orleans firm of Frilot, LLC. "What does a 500 case backlog tell you about the Bush administration's attitude about pursuing these cases?"



Word got back to the hospital I had tried to report this fraud perhaps because I called democratic governor Richardson's office(no response either). This may be one reason there was not much reporting of corruption, no response and no protection from retaliation. The hospital harassed me and had an attorney show up at my house one day asking me a bunch of strange questions. At the time I did not know about this scheme they had with the county so I was very puzzled about what they were up to. Now, I know they were trying to figure out if I knew about the scheme. I was really lucky to get out of there alive.

"Now we see the Justice Department jumping in to a significant whistleblower case. That has a lot of ramifications in terms of what the new Obama administration and the new Justice Department will be looking for going forward," Cranner says.

This is an important way to save millions in healthcare, but really the whole atmosphere of this hospital was corrupt. This kind of corruption attracts those who are not invested in even providing good health care, they were there to scam. They were kind of creepy. Allowing corruption attracts a certain kind of people. We want those altruistic types who care about others back running healthcare. I know the DOJ is working on fraud cases diligently, including drug mills and other scams. It will take a long time to get to all of them because they just got put to the side during George W. Bush's administration. The DOJ under Bush was too busy trying to figure out how to manipulate the laws to violate our rights, put as many people as possible in prison so their buddies can make a profit off of them, and torture people, they didn't have time for little things like Medicaid fraud. Remember the republicans allowed this to go on knowingly, which resulted in millions of healthcare dollars being scammed. Now, they are doing everything they can to block healthcare reform.