A Practitioner's View of Institutional Corruption Through the Lens of the Health Care System: An Essay

I cannot say the root of my cynicism stems solely from my litigation against the healthcare industry. I spent years representing industrial and service unions and their members; the average working person'or hardcore union member'has no allusions about the power of institutions to corrupt. They often view their own employer and their union with the same gimlet eye. Yet, my litigation against the healthcare industry has, at the very least, been a policy laboratory for the understanding of institutional wrongdoing and deficiencies in compliance enforcement.

While the lessons I have learned are in the first instance about 'fraud, waste and abuse,' in the delivery of healthcare, they are transferrable and thus have meaning elsewhere.