A72-year-old man lies seriously ill in a hospital bed, awaiting surgery after a massive heart attack. His family see the medical staff as reliable friends united in an effort to make the patient well.
But behind the rosy ER facade hospital administrators have a separate agenda. During his stay, the patient will be charged for many kinds of drugs and procedures he doesn't need.
On another floor, a 68-year-old woman is undergoing a routine checkup. The doctors confer and decide she needs a full range of blood tests. The patient has no idea that she is in good health and the thousands of dollars' worth of service being provided by the staff is superfluous.
Although there is no reason medical professionals should be immune from the corruption that afflicts others, these are not cases one would expect to find in the stereotypical venues of graft such as Russia, or Third World countries. One would not expect to encounter them in the West - and certainly not in the United States.
Think again. The self-anointed global centre of healthcare excellence has just been exposed as a hive of corruption and greed, a country where hundreds of hospitals every day cheat insurers and patients as routinely as they oversee the taking of a pulse.
When President Bill Clinton tried to transform the nation's private healthcare system into something resembling what critics scorn as 'socialised' systems of Canada and Europe, his main purpose was to protect 50 million Americans now without insurance.
