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	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

Freeman et al¹ outlined how managed health care organizations have limited physicians' autonomy and imposed preapproval criteria that have utilization restraints. In the past, it was realized that physicians entered occasionally false information in medical records to deceive health insurance carriers to secure health benefits for their patients or to protect their patients' confidentiality and even to secure higher physicians' reimbursements; however, it was always assumed that this was done by a small fraction of practitioners. The authors concluded that many physicians use and approve of subterfuge to meet the health needs of their patients.

Additional forms of physician behavior that raise the question of the fidelity of medical records are the use of computers and their software programs with prerecorded health data, including the Health Care Financing Administration's guidelines for bullets of information to qualify for various levels of physician reimbursements.² Computer software programs can shorten physicians' dictation time . . . [Full Text of this Article]

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Lying for Patients: Physician Deception of Third-Party Payers
Victor G. Freeman, Saif S. Rathore, Kevin P. Weinfurt, Kevin A. Schulman, and Daniel P. Sulmasy
Arch Intern Med. 1999;159(19):2263-2270.
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