Brickman Decries DOJ’s Free Pass for Tort Fraud
It would be hard to accuse this administration’s Justice Department of going easy on plaintiffs’ lawyers. See, e.g., Milberg Weiss and Dickie Scruggs. But in a WSJ op-ed this morning, Cardozo law professor Lester Brickman does just that, lambasting the DOJ for what he says is “the free pass it has given to doctors and lawyers to commit mass tort fraud, exceeding $30 billion in the past 15 years.”
Brickman presents the evidence:
Over one million potential litigants have been screened by agents for tort lawyers in asbestos, silica, silicone breast implant and diet drug (fen-phen) litigation. The lawyers sponsoring these screenings have paid over $100 million for medical reports to support the 700,000 or more claims generated by these screenings. There is compelling evidence, much of it reviewed in my published writings, that the vast majority of these medical reports, including chest X-ray readings, echocardiograms, pulmonary function tests and diagnoses are bogus.
U.S. District Court Judge Janis Jack, appointed by President Bill Clinton, blew the whistle on this type of fraud two years ago. It was, she stated, “clear that lawyers, doctors and screening companies were all willing participants . . . [in a scheme to] manufacture . . . [diagnoses] for money.”
He’s flummoxed as to why the DOJ isn’t prosecuting mass tort fraud, the dimensions of which he calls stunning. “A comparative handful of doctors and technicians are responsible for the vast majority of bogus medical tests and diagnoses,” he writes. “To indict and prosecute those responsible would require testimony from other doctors that the mass-produced diagnoses cannot have been rendered in good faith.” He laments that the feds are reluctant to engage in a “battle of the experts,” because it “gives the doctors a special dispensation to commit fraud.”
WSJLAWBLOG
12/27/7
Magnolia Tribune
