Medical is a profession which is considered very noble and respected worldwide. People have no option but to rely on their doctors for medical treatment and keeping them healthy. People also expect that their doctors should give proper treatment and that is why there is respect for the doctors. But, there are instances where doctors are maligning this noble profession by going for unethical practices. Apparently, many doctors are now giving more impetus on profits than ethical practices.
One of the instances where doctors are going for unethical practices has surfaced recently. Some doctors are now confessing to intentionally diagnosing healthy people with cancer to make money. One of the reasons why doctors are falsely diagnosing healthy people with cancer is that they make a lot of profit through treatments such as chemotherapy.
Dr. Farid Fata who practices in Michigan has recently confessed to diagnosing healthy people with cancer in order to make money. Dr Fata admitted in court that he intentionally and wrongfully diagnosed healthy patients with cancer. He also confessed about dragging healthy people into chemotherapy and giving drugs just for the sake of making profit.
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After Dr. Fata’s confession in court, his patients were shell-shocked. Generally, people trust their doctors and such a confession shook them from inside. No one had ever thought that doctor will play with their sentiments and diagnose them with a disease which they never had. And, more so, he diagnosed them with that deadly disease of cancer just to make profit. People were surprised for the audacity of doctor to falsely diagnose and then prescribed chemotherapy and other drugs for making money. Many of the sufferers called this kind of act unconscionable.
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Dr Fata was arrested in 2013 for his offense and the Federal government seized many of his assets set up an $11.9-million restitution fund, which was created to help Fata's victims recover medical costs and other expenses. In total, the government had seized $13 million in total assets from Fata. $1.1 million was paid to the whistle-blower in the case. The office of US attorneys said that the victims can seek reimbursement from the restitution fund.
The costs of reimbursement included co-pays or any un-reimbursed medical costs for treatments, prescriptions, remedial medical and dental treatments, mental health visits, funeral expenses etc. Costs which are not covered by the restitution fund included pain and suffering which are handled in lawsuit, lost wages, travel to get doctor's appointment.
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A victim of Dr. Fata said that she was diagnosed with myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS) which is a precursor to leukemia whereas she only had anemia. She said that she was cognizant of the fact that Dr Fata had falsely diagnosed her until the FBI showed up at her house and told her. It is then she came to know that Dr Fata falsified her bone-marrow test results. "He was torturing me so he could get money, we really don't know what he was putting in our system," she said.
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Two years after Dr. Fadid Fata’s arrest, he was sentenced to 45 years in federal prison for violating more than 550 patients' trust and fraudulently making more than $17 million from false billings. Federal prosecutors deemed it as the most egregious case of fraud they had ever seen. However, many of the victims felt that it was weak punishment. A lady whose husband died because of the treatment said that the doctor killed her husband and he didn’t deserve to be free.
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"This is a huge, horrific series of criminal acts that were committed by the defendant," U.S. District Judge Paul Borman said before sentencing Fata. Borman added that the crimes called for a very significant sentence for very, very terrible conduct. U.S. Attorney Barbara McQuade's prosecutors asked for 175 years of sentence for Dr Farid Fata, the maximum. He reasoned that chemotherapy, as you know, is poison and Dr Fata gave poison to people who didn't even have cancer ... to make money.
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