You never hear a lot of medical business ethic issues. Dr. Bander, from Saint Louis University, used to work for a company called Gambro Healthcare. According to multiple websites, Gambro Healthcare is the world’s third largest kidney dialysis service provider (Savat, 2011). Well, when you think of healthcare, you think of health insurance, customer service, and advertisements. Not in this case. Dr. Bander worked for Gambro as a chief medical officer from 1995 to 2000 (Vitale, 2011); he stated that Gambro was defrauding Medicare and Medicaid out of hundreds of thousands of dollars (Savat, 2011). Dr. Bander had to pay lawyers and filing fees in order to get the case moving (Savat, 2011). The lawsuit was filed in 2001 (Vitale, 2011).
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) began to investigate. This threw Gambro way off track they began to panic. Federal prosecutors said at the time of the 2004 settlement that Gambro overbilled Medicare and Medicaid by setting up a shell company to inflate the billings. The shell company pleaded guilty to a felony charge of execution of a health care fraud scheme (Patrick, 2011). Gambro did what any business would do, if guilty, they paid the plaintiffs off. In an agreement three-and-a-half years later, 2004, Gambro paid $350 million in civil and criminal penalties to settle claims it defrauded Medicare and Medicaid out of hundreds of millions of dollars (FBI, 2010). This agreement, made in December 2004, remains the largest fraud settlement in Missouri history and, at the time, was the sixth largest in the country (FBI, 2010). This lawsuit remains the largest settlement in Missouri history (Savat, 2011).
Under the federal whistle-blower law, Dr. Bander received a $56 million share of the settlement (FBI, 2010). With his settlement amount, Bander started up a new foundation for Medical Ethics. He wanted his students and any