Frauds Get Away Free When the Press Fears Asking Questions

Bharani-PadmanabhanBy: Bharani Padmanabhan, MD – July, 2014

“All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.” – George Orwell

Valley Patriot readers read last month about the mind-boggling fraud associated with Sir Donald Berwick and his close friends Dr. Lucian Leape and Dr. Charles Denham. Readers also were introduced to the corrupt recommendation from Sir Donald Berwick on US Government letterhead when he was Obama’s recess appointee. The Supreme Court just condemned 9-0 Obama’s recess appointments.

Dr. Leape’s 2013 paper asserting his LeapFrog Score is valid was not his first fraudulent paper published at Harvard. Dr. Leape originally shot to fame with a deliberately fraudulent paper in 1991 and reasserted in 1999 as a Report (“To Err Is Human”) from the Institute of Medicine in Washington DC which claimed American doctors kill 44,000 – 98,000 Americans every single year due to negligence even though the 1991 paper said “98,000 adverse events” not “deaths.”

That 1999 Report ignited the fraud called the LeapFrog Group and set it in business nationwide. Leape recommended LeapFrog by name in that Report without disclosing that Leape founded LeapFrog.

The interesting thing about fraud is that it requires people to believe. In the case of the IOM, people are expected to believe that it is part of the National Institutes of Health, meaning the United States Government and that it’s Reports are issued in the public interest and deserve unquestioning respect and obedience. Nothing could be further from the truth. The IOM is just a private non-profit like so many others that don’t pay taxes and claim to be noble.

The Kansas Feds revealed the corrupt role of Dr. Charles Denham in trying to influence the Report of the National Patient Safety Foundation. He was bribed $11.6 Million. This concern applies equally to Reports issued by the IOM.

It turns out the 1999 IOM Report issued expressly in support of the LeapFrog fraud was not the last IOM report to have corrupt underpinnings. Recently a scandal has broken about the severe conflicts of interest underlying a 2011 IOM Report. IOM asserted that 116 million Americans suffer from moderate to severe pain every day, meaning fully one-third of the population of the United States.

http://www.iom.edu/Reports/2011/Relieving-Pain-in-America-A-Blueprint-for-transforming-Prevention-Care-Education-Research.aspx

Given that no one slapped them down for claiming American doctors kill 100,000 Americans year on year, you really can’t fault them for getting bolder, can you? After all Dr. Leape and his LeapFrog Group have been minting money on that false assertion for years now. It has spawned an entire industry exactly as Madoff spawned all those feeder funds with accountants and typists churning out all those thousands of consciously fake reports month after month for years.

And so it is revealed that 7 of the people who issued this 2011 IOM Report were being paid by the manufacturers of pain pills. And just as Dr Denham never disclosed that he too was affiliated with LeapFrog when he published Dr. Leape’s fake paper in his Journal, the IOM never disclosed that half the Report’s writers were in the pay of pill manufacturers.

Then again, when it comes to people affiliated with the IOM, like Berwick, Leape and the rest, this is par for the course, standard operating procedure, and the normal scheme of things. They know they are consciously violating the law. There is absolutely nothing “inadvertent” about what they do.

The only thing out of the ordinary here is public exposure. And the reason for the exposure is the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel has real journalists who refused to kowtow to “authorities” as the Boston Globe always does. They did not treat the IOM folks as more equal than the rest of us.

The Globe has had documentary evidence for 2 years now of the various frauds consciously perpetrated by Dr. Leape and has refused to go to print, even pointedly ignoring the outing of Dr. Denham by the Feds. Naturally the Globe happily published a gushing puff piece on Dr. Denham instead. Some are more equal than others.

The Boston Globe even gave me in writing that press releases from the White House should not be questioned and should be printed in the pages of the Globe as proven fact. I call that the Pravda school of journalism.

The Globe is part of the reason the annual homicide solve rate for Boston is half that of Milwaukee or Houston. Per the FBI, Boston has 32 officers per 10,000 people compared to 23 in Houston and 32 in Milwaukee so resources and funding are not the problem.
When the Press is afraid of taking on frauds who claim to be pillars of the establishment – the untouchables who are above the law and all question, shies away from holding even public servants accountable and openly editorializes against families whose children have been illegally imprisoned by a Harvard hospital, that is not a surprising outcome. Rule of law suffers greatly. And the Press becomes part of the problem.

Dr Bharani Padmanabhan is a Board-Certified neurologist who specializes in Multiple Sclerosis in the Boston area. scleroplex@gmail.com