"Primum nil nocere." First, do no harm. This bedrock principle in medicine is a foreign language to most politicians and, sadly, to some Wisconsin doctors, who have violated their oath and the public trust as they have defrauded Wisconsin taxpayers.(Read the full text of "Organized medical fraud in Wisconsin")
Several University of Wisconsin family physicians donned their sacred white coats and were caught distributing fraudulent "sick notes" free for the asking quite literally by the boxful -- I wonder who paid for that printing -- to teachers and others who skipped work to engage in political protest at the state Capitol in Madison. Whatever the merits of the teachers' protest, there's a word for what these doctors and teachers are perpetrating: fraud.
An army of citizen-journalist bloggers, including Tim Daniels of Left Coast Rebel and Ann Althouse, captured and publicized photographs and video allegedly of publicly funded University of Wisconsin doctors... as they disseminated these fraudulent notes to Wisconsin's publicly funded teachers so the teachers could have a publicly funded day off...
As Dr. Wolf notes, this reported behavior runs contrary to the core principles of the Hippocratic Oath. But at least the wheels of justice appear to be in motion now.
(And thank you, Dr. Wolf, for mentioning my earlier PajamasMedia piece, "The Wisconsin Protests and the New Medical Ethics", and FIRM in your OpEd!)
