Anyone familiar with privatized healthcare probably knows from experience that the Hippocratic Oath often gives way to hypocrisy in the form of surprisingly high medical bills for simple procedures. But sometimes, healthcare professionals also succumb to the temptation to sidestep government regulations and rake in millions of illegal dollars. And when exploitation becomes that profitable, it can inspire shockingly villainous levels of dishonesty—sometimes even blatant patient endangerment.

10Changing The Definition Of “Sick” To Admit More Patients

With the constant barrage of news stories about all the food additives and household objects that can give us cancer or otherwise damage our health, the last thing we need as a society is another excuse to descend into hypochondria. But even when we do succumb to the urge to treat every itch and hiccup as a symptom of the plague, we should still be able to trust nurses and physicians to set us straight with the proper diagnosis.

Florida-based Health Management Associates saw it differently. With the aid of complex software and a little old-fashioned strong-arming, the for-profit hospital admitted an excess of patients who needed little or no medical attention in order to bill Medicare. Hospital staffers were so eager to treat visitors that an infant whose body temperature registered at 37.1 degrees Celsius (98.7 °F)—one-tenth of a degree higher than the average temperature of 37 degrees (98.6 °F)—was documented as having a fever, resulting in needless and costly medical tests.

But not everyone involved in the hospital ruse was a willing participant. According to a whistle-blower lawsuit filed against the company, it was standard practice to fire physicians who refused to play ball, and administrators with ethical concerns about excessive hospital admissions suffered similar fates. Unfortunately, because of the increasingly convoluted financial affiliations and colossal scales that are coming to characterize groups like Health Management Associates, these kinds of abuses will likely be a persisting nightmare for regulators.

9Delegating Medical Treatments To Unqualified Staffers

Dr. Ravi Sharma was a certified thoracic surgeon who sought to help people lose weight through his Florida-based Life’s Image weight-loss center. And while one might not think of a chest doctor as the first person to run to with a severe case of glut-gut, it’s perfectly reasonable to expect the clinic to at least be staffed with professionals who know how to treat weight-related medical problems.

Unfortunately, Dr. Sharma was too busy being courted by dollar bills to worry about whether the people tending to his patients had any real clue what they were doing. Instead of recruiting certified professionals to perform vein injections and other invasive procedures, Sharma relied on untrained staffers—including an office manager—to do the work. The thoracic surgeon not only didn’t perform the procedures, he wasn’t even present to oversee them. Instead, he often texted the instructions for performing ultrasounds and varicose vein injections to his staff, according to one complaint against him.

To make matters worse, many of the invasive procedures were unnecessary, performed only for the purpose of charging extra money. Sharma, who only saw a few patients himself, sought Medicare payments for the procedures that his untrained assistants performed as well. But everything fell apart when he fired office manager Patti Lovell, who repaid the gesture by exposing Sharma’s indiscretions in a whistle-blower lawsuit. Sharma, however, having learned that money is the best medicine, simply made his troubles disappear by paying the government $400,000 and has since continued to practice medicine without further punishment.

8Exploiting Workers’ Compensation Claims

For the average Joe just looking to make ends meet, a severe workplace injury offers little more than physical agony and the dire prospect of being unable to provide for your family, not to mention the crippling debt of hospital bills. Thankfully, society has provided an invaluable safety net in the form of workers’ compensation, which covers the cost of recuperation from job-related accidents.

However, for orthopedic hospital owner Michael Drobot, workers’ compensation insurance was the unwitting inspiration for a 16-year, $500 million fraud. Through a series of bribes issued to doctors, chiropractors, and other professionals, Drobot’s clinic pulled in scores of patients who were undergoing surgery for work-related spinal injuries. Thanks to this scheme, many injured workers were sometimes sent hundreds of miles away from their homes for their operations instead of being scheduled for surgeries at the most convenient locations.

To ensure that his chicanery went unchecked, Drobot ingratiated himself with California state senator Ronald S. Calderon with the help of $100,000 in blatant bribe money. But since being apprehended, the corrupt hospital owner has done nothing but talk in attempts to reduce his punishment, dragging down Calderon and others in the process.

7Pretending Patients Are Terminally Ill To Get Medicare Funding

Hospices are essentially healthcare purgatories where the terminally ill wait out their final months under the care of staff trained to make their exit as painless as possible. They also happen to reduce hospital expenses and place a smaller financial burden on the Medicare program, which only covers expenses for hospice patients who are diagnosed with six or fewer months to live. Accordingly, hospitals and hospices have a large incentive to identify dying patients who no longer wish to extend their lives.

But between 2001 and 2013, Vistas Hospice Services, America’s largest privatized palliative care service, squandered millions of dollars in Medicare reimbursements on healthy and otherwise ineligible individuals. To promote these deceptive hospice enrollments, Vistas paid bonuses to staffers who played along, all while ignoring doctors’ and nurses’ concerns about the suitability of the care being administered. And in addition to this blatant subsidy abuse, Vistas also improperly identified some patients as suitable for crisis care, a highly expensive recourse reserved for patients who are severely impaired by illness. These bogus expenses were in turn passed off to taxpayers through Medicare reimbursements.

In one of the most telling cases, Vistas charged Medicare $170,000 to provide intensive nursing assistance to a woman who was not only not critically ill, but healthy enough to live on her own and perform household chores. Other patients who were supposedly knocking on death’s door were going to church and attending bingo halls. Because of such wholesale dishonesty, Vistas’s crisis care costs were almost six times that of the national average. These kinds of aberrations tend to attract the attention of the US government, which busted Vistas as part of a multibillion-dollar Medicare fraud investigation.

6Profiting From Dying Patients And Then Abandoning Them To Avoid Associated Costs

As we just observed, the best interests of the sick and dying sometimes take a backseat to the appeal of extended Medicare reimbursements. However, rather than blatantly lying about the condition of their patients like Vistas, many for-profit hospices opt for the more subtle approach of enrolling disproportionately high numbers of dementia sufferers, who sometimes live years longer than expected and—on average—require less care than other typical hospice patients.

The US government attempted to clamp down on this clandestine corruption by setting a $25,000 limit on the amount of money that hospices can receive without having to repay the government. However, numerous for-profit hospices nonetheless exceed their reimbursement caps by 50 percent or more. If they’re still in hot water, they can simply declare bankruptcy to avoid paying large debts, leaving ailing patients and their families to scramble for new providers while taxpayers foot the bill.

In a particularly striking case of this systematic abuse, Sojourn Care Inc. chose to close down after accruing $27 million in debt, then turned around and reopened under a different name. Consequently, the company was able to relinquish all previous legal obligations—which remained with the now defunct Sojourn Care—and then recruited the healthiest patients from its former incarnation in order to profit off them a bit longer. As a result, 180 of Sojourn Care’s 280 former patients were left to struggle, some dying in uncomfortable conditions as a result. The only thing more dispiriting is the fact that all of this is technically legal, meaning that for scores of families, justice may never be served.

5Conning Drug Addicts Into Entering Psychiatric Lockdown

Hardcore drug addicts are among the most desperate souls one can encounter in any society. Whether you sympathize with their struggles or chide them as harbingers of crime and social decay, there’s no denying that they lead lives of physical and mental enslavement at the hands of often deadly substances. So any efforts to help them break the chains of drug dependence should, in theory, be hailed as laudable endeavors.

But in Broward County, Florida, a group of executives overseeing a psychiatric hospital saw fit to provide a different kind of help for substance abusers. Over the course of nine years, the executives paid bribes and doctored documents all in the name of luring drug addicts to their hospital, the Hollywood Pavilion, where the addicts remained locked for weeks on end. But despite the glamorous connotations of its name, the Hollywood Pavilion was far from posh. Instead, patients were stuffed into insect-ridden rooms where they received little or no treatment and were kicked out as soon as their Medicare benefits had been exhausted.

After racking up $67 million in bogus reimbursements by offering empty promises of rehabilitation, the owners, Karen Kallen-Zury and Christian Coloma, received jail terms ranging from 12 to 25 years and were forced to pay millions in restitution. While none of these consequences can undo the injustices wrought against their victims, one can take some comfort in knowing that others in need of rehabilitation can’t be roped in by this toxic deception.

4Performing Fake Surgeries

One of the truly nightmarish aspects of surgery is the abject vulnerability of it. A patient must submit to drug-induced slumber so that a group of strangers can slice them open and proceed to poke, prod, and jostle their delicate innards. Were it not for the fact that this task was left up to highly trained experts, the surgeries would seem like blatant felonies. Unfortunately, some highly trained experts aren’t above behaving like felons.

Take, for example, Dr. Spyros Panos, an orthopedic surgeon at Saint Francis Hospital in Poughkeepsie, New York. Despite supposedly being fully capable of performing legitimate surgeries on his patients, it appears that the doctor opted to feign operations or perform them with the shoddiest of workmanship. A collection of 250 lawsuits filed by Panos’s former patients details how the surgeon performed excessive surgeries on some patients while not properly completing operations on others. In some cases, he sedated and opened up patients to give the illusion of surgery before sealing them right back up without making a single alteration.

Spanos’s exploits allowed him to schedule up to 22 surgeries per day, nearly 20 times the monthly average of his colleagues. And at least one of his dubious undertakings appears to have led to the death of a patient. While Panos has remained reticent about charges against him, his social media posts and personal blog ironically paint the picture of a doctor who takes patient care seriously. Fortunately for everyone, Spanos has since been convicted and has made a full confession.

3Recruiting The Homeless For Unnecessary Medical Treatment

By now, it’s abundantly clear that medical practitioners will sometimes travel great lengths down the path of dishonesty to make a few extra bucks. But we often expect that people who have dedicated themselves to saving lives will only go so far before succumbing to the pull of the angels on their shoulders. But if such a thing does occur, it certainly didn’t happen in California, where some of its most vulnerable citizens have been turned into fleshly ATM cards by hospital administrators.

A chain of Los Angeles-based medical facilities was caught enticing homeless people to submit to unnecessary medical testing. Lassoed in with miniscule bribes, homeless people were carted off to the hospital to receive second-rate treatment—or no treatment at all—before being loaded into ambulances and dumped in the famously seedy Skid Row. The bogus treatments were in turn billed to Medicaid. In one particularly horrifying instance, a homeless woman received a nitroglycerin patch for a fabricated illness, resulting in a dangerous drop in blood pressure.

All of this was made possible through a series of paid runners who collected and redeposited the homeless “patients.” The impromptu hospital visits accrued more than $16 million for the hospital chain. But the observant eye of Scott Johnson, an employee of Union Rescue Mission, caught on to the bizarre back-and-forth of makeshift homeless shuttles. After Johnson informed the police of the suspicious activity, a lengthy investigation busted the scheme wide open and led to a $16.5 million settlement.

2Unnecessary Chemo Treatments

Anyone with a passing knowledge of chemotherapy probably understands two things: It’s supposed to kill cancer, and the treatment’s side effects include hair loss and general anatomical misery. Because some chemo drugs can cause problems as severe as lung damage and permanent deafness, it’s imperative that the treatment only be administered when necessary.

But we live in a world rife with avoidable suffering, thanks in no small part to oncologist Farid Fata, whose litany of lies includes administering cancer drugs to people who didn’t have cancer. According to a complaint filed by the US government after a thorough FBI investigation, Dr. Fata issued $150 million worth of partially fraudulent Medicare bills over a three-year period. His chosen method of deception was to simply treat patients for the wrong illness or withhold valuable information about less costly alternatives. A nurse employed under Fata reported examining a chart of 40 of his patients and discovering that 95 percent of them were being improperly treated.

In some cases, Fata would write prescriptions for lifelong drug treatment even though curative surgeries were available. But the most shocking infractions involved his willingness to falsely diagnose patients with cancer in order to profit off the ensuing tests and chemotherapy. After finally being apprehended by authorities in 2013, Fata faces massive fines and a decade-long prison sentence.

1Performing Unnecessary, Life-Threatening Surgeries On The Elderly

Like all of the other facilities on this list, Sacred Heart was the site of systematic Medicare fraud at the expense of patients. To perpetrate this multimillion-dollar fraud, hospital administrators not only paid kickbacks to have patients artificially referred to them, but also had ambulances deliver patients to the emergency room to force automatic Medicare billing. They also artificially extended hospital stays and subjected elderly patients to unnecessary operations—sometimes with fatal results.

One of the hospital’s most wanton offenders, Dr. Vittorio Guerriero, reportedly induced breathing complications in at least 28 patients, at which point tracheotomies were required. In the course of performing these invasive procedures, which required holes to be drilled into the victims’ throats, five people died. The entire operation was so corrupt that Sacred Heart was forced to shut down after the authorities seized its financial assets.

A.C. Grimes is not a healthcare professional and can therefore be trusted. Feel free to check out some of his other writings on Cracked.com .

It’s a question that has haunted the thoughts of countless hospital patients: Can I trust the professional who currently holds my life in his hands? In most cases, the answer is “yes.” But there are cases of wanton negligence and predatory opportunism by health care providers that could give even the most trusting patient a case of the health care heebie-jeebies.

10 A Doctor Encourages A Patient To Commit Suicide

Dr. Arun Singhal was a general physician at a hospital in Liverpool, England. In May 2011, he consulted on a case of a distraught woman who was on antidepressants. The woman, referred to as “Patient A,” was a witness for the prosecution in a rape case. After discovering that she lived close to the rape suspect’s brother, Patient A called Singhal for a sick note to absolve her from taking the stand. Terrified, she also admitted to being on the verge of suicide and said that her antidepressants weren’t working.

Singhal’s response to Patient A was more becoming of a sadistic Internet troll than a licensed lifesaver. He chided her as a “disgrace” of a patient and told the woman to “jolly well kill herself.” He even suggested that she consult the Internet for useful suicide tips. But as Singhal dispensed his decidedly unprofessional advice, he had no clue that Patient A was recording their conversation. Understandably upset, she filed a complaint.

The Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service looked into the matter and concluded that Singhal had likely taken Patient A’s claims too lightly and had behaved inexcusably. The doctor was subsequently suspended for three months. Considering the tragedy which might have happened if Patient A had followed the doctor’s orders, Singhal is lucky that he wasn’t fired.

9 A Vengeful Ex–Hospital Employee Sends Patients Fake Lobotomy Letters

From 2005 to 2010, Michelle Morrison of Elk Grove Village, Illinois, served as the senior account representative for Alexian Brothers Behavioral Health Hospital before being laid off. Feeling embittered and vengeful, she lashed out by stealing hospital stationery and the private information of more than 30 patients as part of a heartless plot to embarrass her former bosses.

From February 2011 to June 2012, Morrison sent six fraudulent letters to three Alexian Brothers patients claiming that their psychological treatments had failed and they would need to undergo frontal lobotomies. The letters also contained crude, debasing remarks and threats to reveal the patients’ medical information to their friends, family, and coworkers.

A two-month investigation uncovered Morrison as the culprit. Caught with patient files and other hospital materials in her home, she had little recourse but to plead guilty. Outwardly repentant, Morrison apologized in court for what was her first criminal offense on record. As punishment, she was placed on 30 months’ probation.

8 Nursing Home Employees Play Cruel Jokes On Dementia Patients

In 2010, at the Valley View Skilled Nursing Facility in Ukiah, California, six employees decided that it would be hilarious to cover seven defenseless dementia patients from head to toe with ointment to create a slippery challenge for the next shift of employees. But rather than having a hearty belly laugh, these cruel employees, aged 23 to 51 years old, were arrested.

Unfortunately, the Ukiah sextet are not the only perpetrators of cruel nursing home misconduct. In May 2012, an employee was dismissed from the UK-based Kirknowe Care Home after feeding a dog treat to a dementia patient as a joke. Nursing home employee Tracie Nellis also displayed sadistic behavior. In 2013, she deposited hot sauce into the mouths of two sleeping dementia patients, a misdeed for which she voluntarily relinquished her nursing license.

The list of similar and far graver offenses seems endless. All of them tell the too-common story of health care workers who take advantage of vulnerable patients.

7 A Doctor Slaps The Butts Of Sedated Patients

For at least a year, Dr. Michael T. Clarke, a physician at St. Joseph’s Hospital Health Center in Syracuse, New York, delighted in hearing the sharp thwack of his palm against the butt cheeks of his unconscious patients in the operating room. He would later try to pass off this behavior as a way to gauge the effectiveness of spinal anesthetics. But coworkers present in the operating room painted a different picture.

According to them, the slaphappy doctor spewed sexually explicit insults while striking his patients, sometimes using enough force to leave lasting red handprints. Allegedly, he also hurled raunchy comments at hospital staff. After months of remaining tight-lipped about Dr. Clarke’s shocking bedside manner, members of the OR staff finally alerted hospital administrators in December 2013.

A state health department investigation corroborated complaints against Clarke. He was suspended in February 2014 and required to take undisclosed steps to qualify for reinstatement. After eight months, he was back in the operating room at St. Joseph’s.

6 A Surgeon Sends Sexts Mid-Operation

A medical practitioner for 20 years, anesthesiologist Arthur K. Zilberstein was based at Swedish Medical Center in Seattle, Washington, when he committed his infractions. Across a variety of procedures—everything from caesarian sections to pediatric appendectomies—the doctor took the time to send nearly 250 sexually suggestive text messages and explicit photos to his girlfriend and sometimes his own patients.

In one instance, he sent a patient a selfie that showed him in hospital attire with his genitals dangling in plain view. During a stomach surgery, he sent 45 lusty texts in under 90 minutes.

Dr. Zilberstein has also been implicated in reviewing patients’ medical records for his own carnal pleasure, engaging in hospital romps, and doling out unauthorized prescriptions. Whether his indulgences ever injured anyone is unclear, but state officials felt that Zilberstein’s indiscretions warranted the suspension of his medical license. At that time, Swedish Medical Center also suspended the doctor’s privileges.

5 An Anesthetist Punches His Patient After Heart Surgery

Dr. Andrei Votyakov, an anesthetist at Russia’s Federal Center for Cardiovascular Surgery in Perm, had slogged through a 36-hour shift and reached the edge of his patience. According to Votyakov, it was in this compromised state that he encountered a recent heart surgery patient, who was wearing an oxygen mask and had both of his arms and legs strapped to the bed.

The 61-year-old patient allegedly insulted Votyakov and displayed zero appreciation for his work. At that point, the doctor jettisoned what little composure he had left and punched the man in the face before pounding on his fragile chest above the heart. The patient later died a week later.

Video footage of the interaction dated February 21, 2013, shows what looks like an argument between Votyakov and the patient before the doctor resorts to violence. The interaction was later posted online, which incensed the public and led to an official investigation. Votyakov apologized for his appalling display of malice but denied causing the patient’s death. The results of a criminal investigation into his behavior apparently supported his claim because the physician was reportedly fined 100,000 rubles and only sentenced to five months of community service.

4 A Nurse Steals From Sleeping Cancer Patients

In January 2015, officials at Morriston Hospital in Wales set out to catch a crook. Someone had been robbing patients since at least the previous November, and the staff believed one of their own was responsible. With the help of local law enforcement, they devised a trap: A marked £20 note was positioned under a plant pot as bait. Much to everyone’s relief, it worked. Much to their chagrin, the culprit was indeed a hospital employee, one who had exploited some of Morriston’s sickest patients.

That employee was 49-year-old nurse Jacqueline Perry, and she worked in Morriston’s cancer ward. Apparently, she waited for cancer patients to fall asleep before rifling through their things for valuables she could sell to fund her husband’s cider habit. The quality and quantity of her heists varied greatly. Perry stole painkillers, cash, and jewelry. In one instance, she lifted £14 from a cancer patient. Another patient, 89-year-old Nancy Thomas, was stripped of treasured family heirlooms—three rings valued at a combined £1,800—before she died. Perry sold those rings for about 10 percent of their value.

In total, Perry bagged £2,739 worth of personal belongings before she was nabbed in the hospital’s sting operation. According to the nurse, her capture was a relief from the guilt that had racked her conscience. For her crimes, Perry received a 16-month jail sentence. Unfortunately, some of her victims didn’t live long enough to see justice done.

3 A Doctor Secretly Records Patients’ Pelvic Exams

Gynecologist and obstetrician Dr. Nikita A. Levy worked at Baltimore’s renowned Johns Hopkins Community Medicine for 25 years. For at least eight of those years, he secretly wore a camera pen to clandestinely film the gynecological exams of his unsuspecting patients. Johns Hopkins learned of his behavior when a female colleague reported her suspicions about his pen in 2013.

The hospital brought in law enforcement, which found over 1,200 videos and pictures dating back to at least 2005. But during the 25 years that Levy had worked at the community clinic, he had seen a staggering 12,692 women who were deemed potential victims. The hospital had no choice but to inform all of them of the deep privacy violation.

Authorities found no tangible evidence that Levy recorded the women’s exams for anything more than private use, but that was traumatic enough for his victims. Some reported refusing to see doctors or take their children to doctors upon being informed of Levy’s abuses. A class action lawsuit was filed, and Johns Hopkins agreed to pay $190 million to over 7,000 of Levy’s former patients in compensation. Levy’s fate was far darker. Ten days after being outed for his crimes, he penned a letter of apology to his wife and killed himself with helium and a plastic bag.

2 A Drunken Anesthetist Accidentally Kills A New Mother

On September 26, 2014, Belgian-born Helga Wauters reported for duty at a private French clinic where she had been employed for two weeks. Although new to the facility, she’d been an anesthetist since 1994. No one would have been blamed for thinking that 28-year-old Xynthia Hawke was in good hands when she went into labor, and Wauters was tasked with supplying pain medication. Instead, Wauters tragically killed Hawke in a bout of drunken incompetence.

After Wauters gave Hawke an epidural, the anesthetist stepped out for a drink with friends. But labor difficulties made a caesarean necessary. The anesthetist now had to guide a tube into Hawke’s trachea in order to administer additional medication. But when Wauters returned to the clinic, she reeked of alcohol and, according to her colleagues, seemed off-kilter. Nonetheless, she was allowed to work. Wauters mistakenly placed the ventilation tube in Hawke’s esophagus, causing a heart attack. Hawke died four days later. Fortunately, her child survived.

As it turned out, Wauters had a serious drinking problem, a point punctuated by 17 empty vodka bottles that authorities found lying around her home. She admitted to drinking “a glass of rose” after giving Hawke the epidural as well as imbibing water-vodka mix the night of the procedure. The anesthetist also unconvincingly tried to excuse her drinking by claiming that alcohol diminished her faculties by 30 percent but helped to steady her hands. Tests by law enforcement showed that Wauters had almost five times the legal limit of alcohol in her system on the day after her fatal drunken bungle.

When Wauters was arrested, she was initially denied bail. But the court eventually relented, ordering Wauters to pay 50,000 euros in bail and forbidding her to leave France or practice medicine. She also had to enter a rehabilitation program.

1 Doctors Who Ditch Patients Mid-Surgery

At Community Regional Medical Center in Fresno, California, cardiac surgeon Dr. Pervaiz Chaudhry performed almost 350 bypass surgeries between 2009 and 2010, placing him among the top five heart surgeons in California based on total number of surgeries. But his heavy workload seemingly came at a huge cost: Chaudhry had a below-average patient survival rate for his state. Of course, that depressing statistic might also be the result of Chaudhry’s alleged inclination to abandon patients during operations.

A number of lawsuits accuse Chaudry of ducking out of the operating room without completing heart surgeries. In one incident, his hospital was fined $75,000 after he left a physician’s assistant to close up a patient’s chest while he attended a luncheon. The patient, 72-year-old Silvino Perez, suffered a myocardial infarction, and the resulting physical trauma left him in a persistent vegetative state. Chaudhry has denied these and other charges levied against him, but an investigation by California’s State Department of Health found that the heart doctor had recklessly endangered Perez. The outcomes of other claims are currently unknown.

Chaudhry’s not the only professional to sacrifice a patient at the altar of good eats. In 2012, an anesthesiologist and a nurse anesthetist at a Swedish hospital inadvertently killed a man with a lunch break. They were supposed to be removing a tumor from a 72-year-old man, but as soon as lunchtime hit, the doctor shoved off for chow. Fifteen minutes later, the head nurse anesthetist also succumbed to hunger and left.

A nurse from the orthopedic ward was asked to sub for the doctor-nurse duo. Unfortunately, she lacked the vital expertise to realize that the patient’s respirator was turned off and to respond when he suddenly started hemorrhaging. By the time the lunching doctor and nurse returned, their patient had been starved of oxygen for eight minutes. He later died of brain damage.