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The Money Machine
As the fraud has evolved, it's come to resemble an assembly line that Henry Ford might have envied. It begins with lawyers and screening outfits soliciting patients -- which they refer to as "inventory" -- using radio, TV, newspaper and direct-mail ads. Workers are lured to mass screenings at no charge, often by the promise of riches if they "pass."It's no sleek, high-tech clinic that they visit; often, it's a trailer set up in the parking lot of a megastore or a nondescript building in a strip mall. Inside, there's typically an x-ray machine and clerical workers surrounded by tables piled with forms.
In some cases, "successful" visitors are steered to an on-site lawyer or paralegal. In June 2002, Royce Harmon, an investigator for the Texas Department of Health in Fort Worth, looked into a complaint that "a company was flagging people in off the street to take x-rays." Harmon arrived at a Staples store, where he found "two young women at the entrance to the parking lot holding up signs." Turns out, the women were lawyers hired by Heath Mason, the man behind N&M screening.
A work history is one of three critical steps in diagnosing asbestosis, along with an x-ray and a physical examination. No complete work history or physical exam? No problem for Mason. "To ask a doctor to take a work history would be like asking [a lawyer] to wash my car. It's very beneath him," says Mason. From 1996 until the firm shut down last year, he raked in $25.5 million from law firms for his now discredited services.
Mason and other screeners have their place on the assembly line. Their stacks of manufactured diagnoses are used by attorneys to file mammoth lawsuits that overwhelm both the courts and companies. A few really sick patients -- who would likely be awarded big bucks by a jury -- are included with the phony ones, ensuring that companies cave in and pay huge universal settlements.
No part of the process is more cynical than the way plaintiff lawyers market the inventory. One blast fax to defense attorneys offered a bargain price to settle the claims.
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