Auditing the Medicare-Billing Practices of Teaching Physicians — Welcome Accountability, Unfair Approach

Abstract

Medicine has always embraced the concept of public accountability but until now has not had to face its reality. Those of us fortunate enough to have lived through the past three or four decades — medicine's halcyon era — recall with longing the public's implicit trust in a profession that was acknowledged, with few exceptions, to use the public's largess responsibly without much oversight. Standards of conduct were assumed to be high, professional mechanisms for addressing wrongdoing were assumed to be robust, and institutional accounting procedures were assumed to be sufficient to prevent the misuse of public funds. On the . . .