Is Lying to Insurance Companies Acceptable?
Physicians have been under increasing pressure from managed care organizations to cut health care costs. As the managed care organizations impose stricter control on access to medical treatments, physicians face new ethical dilemmas. Anecdotal evidence suggests that some physicians have chosen to “game” the system in order to obtain care for their patients. The full extent of the deception of third-party payers is unknown. Freeman and associates studied physicians’ willingness to deceive insurance companies in order to secure care for their patients. A cross-sectional mailed survey was used to evaluate physician willingness to use deception in six vignettes with scenarios ranging in clinical severity: coronary bypass surgery, arterial revascularization, intravenous pain medication and nutrition, screening mammography, emergent psychiatric referral and cosmetic rhinoplasty. In each vignette, physicians were presented with a scenario in which a colleague was considering deceiving a third
