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Linda Smoot Radeker – the Ethics of Mental Health

By October 10, 2013 No Comments

            People are hardly neutral about the IRS. It is the government agency that most of us love to hate. Yet I found something quite redeeming about the IRS; their website provides a better read than most of the novels I’ve glanced at lately. For example, there is a section on the IRS Medicare Fraudwebsite that is devoted to healthcare fraud. In that section are examples of ethical foul-up’s that are so unbelievable, it is a wonder that anyone could be that brazen enough to commit them and still manage to look at themselves in the mirror every morning.

            Professions above reproach

I always considered mental health professionals as being right up there with the clergy and Supreme Court Judges. Mental health counselors work with us to lift our spirits and help us through very hard times; they are supposed to guide us through tough ethical decisions. They are entrusted to be our support and a safe harbor.

Having met many mental health professionals in my seminars and classes, I will say that most are quite compassionate, but every once in a while “a real winner” marches across the ethical stage; enter Linda Smoot Radeker.

According to the IRS:

“On August 8, 2013, in Charlotte, N.C., Linda Smoot Radeker, of Shelby, N.C., was sentenced to 72 months in prison, two years of supervised release and ordered to pay $6,156,674 in restitution to Medicaid.”  As an ethics author and speaker, obviously the ethics of mental health were seriously violated.

How does one mental health professional (Ms. Radeker was a licensed professional counselor) come to owe Medicaid more than $6 million?  

In September 2012, Radeker pleaded guilty to one count of health care fraud conspiracy and two counts of money laundering.

The IRS tells us that “from 2008 to 2011 Radeker obtained at least $6.1 million in fraudulent reimbursement payments from false claims submitted to Medicaid. Radeker…falsely claimed in billings submitted to Medicaid that she was the attending clinician for services provided to Medicaid recipients, when no such services were provided.”

 On top of that piece of evidence, Ms. Radeker was also found guilty of sharing her Medicaid provider number with a network of other “professionals” for a fee of up to 50 percent of the billing. This is sort of like me being able to buy the license of my internist or the certification of the airline pilot on the last flight I took.

So not only was this Ms. Radeker’s ethical dilemma, the greed of the situation also sucked in others as well. It was a mental health free-for-all, except it wasn’t free. Medicaid paid out millions.

It was reported that “the co-conspirators primarily used the Medicaid numbers of children whose parents thought were being enrolled in after school programs.  These after school programs were, in fact, owned and operated by Radeker’s co-conspirators.”

In my opinion, the co-conspirators were every bit as culpable as the professional who sold her license number.

Where do we begin?

I suppose the alternate question could be, “Should we be surprised?” The truth is that if a person such as Ms. Radeker or even a group of people are allowed to operate without a firm system of checks and balances, and if the opportunity presents itself, there is the likelihood that some of the people within the organization will yield to the temptations of greed. We have seen this phenomenon occur time and time again. Yes, it bothers me that someone who is in a tremendous position of trust should have proven to be so unethical, but I am not surprised.

In the case of Ms. Radeker, the fact that she has committed fraud on such a massive scale is the only surprise, but that she was able to convince others to go down the same road is shocking.

Perhaps at the root of it all is the myth that the fraudulent billing of Medicaid is a victimless crime. It is not. Medicaid’s funding must be paid for, and those paying those bills are ultimately you and me. Programs such as Medicaid have been established to help the most vulnerable among us; to help provide medical and mental health services to those who need treatment the most.

In a profession supposedly administered by those filled with compassion and empathy, Radeker displayed neither quality. Perhaps, at the very beginning – and throughout her career – had she been required to attend regular classes in ethics, she might have changed her ways.

For now, and if she is lucky, she will learn that we must all pay the price for arrogance. The profession is better off without her and hopefully, her case will provide a learning opportunity for others about to be tempted to do wrong.

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