Doctors In Peril (doctorsinperil.org) is an organization whose mission statement is to help physicians avoid the financial and emotional devastation of personal bankruptcy, so increasingly common in the last 10 years. Physicians, as a lot, are caring, compassionate and trusting. They often allow their trusting approach to patients cloud their judgment when it comes to business dealings. Physicians, especially primary care, no longer enjoy high incomes and the ability to quickly recover from financial mistakes. Businesses that prey on physicians, however, continue to treat them as easy targets because they are so trusting. D.I.P. was started after my physician wife was driven into bankruptcy by the combination of an embezzling office manager, insurance contracts that reduced her reimbursement to below Medicare and the purchase of an expensive piece of equipment that she was assured would pay for itself within 6 months. She was a wonderful person and an outstanding doctor who blamed herself for her failure. She left this world almost a year ago now, leaving behind 2 small children and a loving husband.
The charter of D.I.P. is to identify and expose unscrupulous businesses and organizations that deal with doctors and to assist physicians in seeking redress for any harm that becomes them due to a company’s refusal to take responsibility for a defective product or service.
Although our charter is to help physicians that have been harmed, we still maintain a list of blogs and websites that target specific companies that have received an inordinate number of complaints.
If your problem is related to the healthcare industry and you believe you have been injured or defrauded or otherwise harmed by a faulty, negligent or misrepresented product or service, please describe your situation below. If enough people complain about a particular company or organization, we will launch an investigation. If we find merit in the complaints, we will assist you in getting your money back. When companies are uncooperative, we can contact local or national media. The threat of public exposure is often enough to get them make amends. Finally, legal action is warranted when the problem is pervasive and no other remedy appears likely to affect permanent change. Our goal in these instances is as much to force the board of directors to remove unethical management as to extract a financial penalty. We have established a legal fund for purposes of pursuing the worst cases of human and corporate greed and misbehavior. We are also interested in cataloging complaints against civic leaders, judges, district attorneys, elected officials and attorneys whom abuse the judicial process.
If you would like to become a member of D.I.P., please register for an account, provide your contact information, and tell us your story. If you elect to receive our free newsletter, we will periodically send you information about pending actions, investigations and other newsworthy items as they apply to our charter.
If you would like to describe a complaint, please list your contact information after you register. You are given the option of remaining anonymous, although if we decide to litigate on your behalf, we will need your identity. Short of a court order, we will respect anonymity and work to keep your identity private.
We maintain a list of web sites that track and report on corporate misdeeds. This list is not all inclusive and we try to keep it up to date. Some of these sites are taken down from time to time by the corporation’s attorneys hired to fight them. We will maintain a list of such corporations and their successes and failures in suppressing the truth. The movie Sicko, by the way, is a pretty accurate assessment of corporate greed and its impact on quality medical care.
