That’ll Be $50 For Your Co-Pay Today
My first day of work as a medical assistant was during Fall quarter as a second year in college. I was a fresh, pre-health undergrad jumping to take on any opportunity that came my way. So when the chance to work at a Dermatology office in the Golden Triangle of Beverly Hills opened up, it was like telling a kid they could have dessert before breakfast. How could I resist?
The requisite to become “officially” employed was 180 “internship” hours – basically unpaid work that they could consider as training. That took about 3 months of free labor for me, a full time student who could only go in for two full 8 hour shifts a week. In retrospect, much of the necessary skills I learned could easily have been taught in at least 5 shifts. Strange, but I didn’t care. I got to work on the eighth floor of a fancy schmancy Wells Fargo building with a concierge man hired to press the elevator button for me! (The concierge man doesn’t usually do it for me since I always greet him with a facial expression that lets him know my fingers work and I can manage to do it on my own).
In my early days of working, I met many of the other medical assistants who were all also UCLA undergraduates. One of them was Joanna, who taught me the important medical procedures: how to assist for cyst removals and skin biopsies, take patient vitals, scribe patient history, diagnoses, and treatment plans, and send in prescriptions for medication. She also taught me the treatments that I would soon be doing on my own: TCA chemical peels, liquid N2 and electrocautery treatments, and corticosteroid injections. “Wait – on my own?” I asked her. “Yea…we also have to do treatment on patients,” she replied. And that opened up a segue for the other important, grittier details she needed to teach me about the job. “The doctor is, well, kind of sketchy,” she told me with a hesitant and cautious expression on her face.“How so?” I questioned.
I took out my phone and typed in the doctor’s name along with “fraud” in the search bar. I clicked on the first link I saw and there it was at the top of the page, typed in all caps Times New Roman font: “BEVERLY HILLS DOCTOR SENTENCED TO THREE YEARS IN PRISON FOR CONVICTION ON BANKRUPTCY FRAUD, TAX EVASION.” I dropped my jaw and laughed because that was the only emotion I could process. I was in disbelief.
In 2002, the doctor who owns the practice was sentenced to 36 months in prison along with an order to pay $2.4 million in restitution and hundreds of thousands of more dollars in other fines. She was a part of an “elaborate scheme to defraud her creditors” and connived with her attorneys to create bank accounts in false names with several corporations. Oh, that’s what Carissa meant by “sketchy.”
That’s not even all of it. My doctor’s husband was also charged as a co-conspirator. He was a cardiac anaesthesiologist and together they had two children. On the third day of deliberations, he took his own life and jumped from the 10th floor of the Embassy Suites hotel they were staying at during the trial. This seemed like a Netflix documentary waiting to happen.
Dermatology and Anesthesiology. Two of the highest paying specialties in medicine and known for having great work-life balance. How much more money could they have possibly needed to resort to bankruptcy fraud and tax evasion? In my mind, people become healthcare professionals to serve others in need. When I imagine the kind of doctor I want to be, I am drawn towards Paul Kalanithi’s words in When Breath Becomes Air: “The physician’s duty is not to stave off death… but to take into our arms a patient whose life has disintegrated and work until they can stand back up and face, and make sense of, their own existence.” That is the description I optimistically hope for healthcare professionals to be. I cannot look at my doctor the same way, or any doctor without a hint of fear that they may be making decisions for ulterior motives. Although my faith in the current state of healthcare has dwindled, I know that I can at least trust myself. I can aspire to fulfill my duties as a healthcare provider with integrity, empathy, and better financial decisions.