The March of Legal Settlements Made by Pharmaceutical Companies is Diminishing - Presaging Even Less Accountablity for Top Health Care Organizational Leaders?

Introduction

We have long been discussing the legal settlements made by health care organizations of alllegations like fraud, bribery, and kickbacks.  Despite the unsavory nature of the behaviors revealed by most settlements, which often appeared to risk patient harms, the companies involved usually have had to pay fines that were tiny
relative to their multi-billion dollar revenues.  They

A Higher Impunity - How Can we Reduce Health Care Leadership's Impunity When the President Claims His Own Impunity?

Impunity: an Introduction

We believe that unaccountable leadership is a major cause of health care dysfunction.  Impunity is an extreme form of unaccountable leadership.

We have noted that despite numerous legal settlements made by health care organizations of alllegations like fraud, bribery, and kickbacks,
almost never do top leaders who presided over these actions face any
negative

Novartis' Latest Ethical Misadventure: Did it Pay to Play ... with the US President?

Amidst the news deluge, a story that stood out in the last few days was that of the strange relationships between a consulting firm set up by President Donald Trump's former lawyer and Trump Organization counsel Michael Cohen, and several large corporations.  As reported on May 8, 2018 by the New York Times, the focus was on the payments made to the firm, Essential Consultants LLC, by a financial

More Dander Rising: Ditto to Dr. Poses

Let me second the emotion now recently and repeatedly voiced by Dr. Poses in these pages. It's getting real hard to separate the health policy and malfeasance fecaliths from the general Washington Scheißsturm raining down on all of us. We feel pretty much buffeted non-stop, like (whomp!) badminton shuttlecocks in the corruption game the prevaricator-in-chief seems happily to carry on forever. Or

The Two-Fold Intimidation of Dr Bornstein, as Orchestrated by Donald Trump, Apparently to Conceal Something About Trump's Medical History

Introduction: Pressures on Health Care Professionals to Violate Core Values and Ethical Standards

Our first discussions with health professionals about the causes of health care dysfunction(1) quickly revealed concerns about influences that push professionals towards unethical actions.  We first heard about cases in which physicians were influenced to suppress clinical research whose results