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Physician Deception of Third-Party Payers

Victor G. Freeman, MD; Saif S. Rathore; Kevin P. Weinfurt, PhD; Kevin A. Schulman, MD, MBA; Daniel P. Sulmasy, OFM, MD, PhD

Arch Intern Med. 1999;159:2263-2270.

Background  Some physicians may resort to deception to secure third-party payer approval for patient procedures. Related physician attitudes, including willingness to use deception, are not well understood.

Objective  To determine physician willingness to deceive a third-party payer and physician attitudes toward deception of third-party payers.

Methods  A cross-sectional mailed survey was used to evaluate physician willingness to use deception in 6 vignettes of varying clinical severity: coronary bypass surgery, arterial revascularization, intravenous pain medication and nutrition, screening mammography, emergent psychiatric referral, and cosmetic rhinoplasty. We evaluated 169 board-certified internists randomly selected from 4 high– and 4 low–managed care penetration metropolitan markets nationwide for willingness to use deception in each vignette.

Results  Physicians were willing to use deception in the coronary bypass surgery (57.7%), arterial revascularization (56.2%), intravenous pain medication and nutrition (47.5%), screening mammography (34.8%), and emergent psychiatric referral (32.1%) vignettes. There was little willingness to use deception for cosmetic rhinoplasty (2.5%). Rates were highest for physicians practicing in predominantly managed care markets, for clinically severe vignettes, and for physicians spending less time in clinical practice. Physician ratings of the justifiability of deception varied by perspective and vignette.

Conclusions  Many physicians sanction the use of deception to secure third-party payers' approval of medically indicated care. Such deception may reflect a tension between the traditional ethic of patient advocacy and the new ethic of cost control that restricts patient and physician choice in the use of limited resources.

From the Clinical Economics Research Unit (Drs Freeman, Weinfurt, and Schulman and Mr Rathore) and Center for Clinical Bioethics (Dr Sulmasy), Georgetown University Medical Center, Washington, DC. Dr Freeman is now at Inova Health Systems, Fairfax, Va. Mr Rathore is now at the School of Public Health, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Drs Weinfurt and Schulman are now at the Center for Clinical and Genetic Economics, Clinical Research Institute, Duke University Medical Center, Durham, NC. Dr Sulmasy is now at the Department of Ethics, Saint Vincents Hospital and Medical Center, New York, NY.

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