healthy4u: American Cancer Society

How Big Health Care Charities Rely on Lying Telemarketers

A modern day Diogenes searching for an honest organization in health care would have a very hard time.  Close to the "you can't make this stuff up" category is a new <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-09-12/charities-deceive-donors-unaware-money-goes-to-a-telemarketer.html">investigative report</a> from Bloomberg on deceptive - to use a polite word - practices at some of the US' biggest health care charities. Using Commercial Telemarketing Firms that Keep Nearly All Money Raised The report showed how major US health care charities use privately held for-profit telemarketing firm InfoCision Management Corp to raise money, but most of the money raised went back to InfoCision.  The opening example was of a particular telemarketing call: <blockquote>A woman named Robin said she was representing the American Diabetes Association. Robin didn’t ask for money. She asked Patterson to stamp and mail pre-printed fundraising letters to 15 neighbors. Both of Patterson’s parents and one grandmother had been diabetic, so she agreed to do it, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its October issue. 'I thought since it does run in the family, it wouldn’t hurt for me to help,' says Patterson, 64, a retired elementary school teacher. She guessed, based on what she knew about charity fundraising, that about 70 to 80 percent of the money she brought in would be used for diabetes research. The truth was almost the exact opposite. The vast majority of funds Patterson, her neighbors and people like them throughout the country would raise -- almost 80 percent -- would never be made available to the Diabetes Association. Instead, that money collected from letters sent to neighbors would go to the company that employed Robin and an army of other paid telephone solicitors: InfoCision Management Corp. Just 22 percent of the funds the association raised in 2011 from the nationwide neighbor-to-neighbor program went to the charity, according to a report on its national fundraising that InfoCision filed with North Carolina regulators. </blockquote> So while some American health care charities boast that most of the money they receive goes to programming, not management or fund raising, in this case, the opposite was true. Many of the Biggest US Health Care Charities Were Involved As the article stated, <blockquote>Many of the biggest-name charities in the U.S. have signed similarly one-sided contracts with telemarketers during the past decade. The American Cancer Society, the largest health charity in the U.S., enlisted InfoCision from 1999 to 2011 to raise money. </blockquote> Also, <blockquote>In the past decade, many of the nation’s biggest health charities have hired InfoCision, including the American Heart Association, American Lung Association, American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, March of Dimes Foundation and National Multiple Sclerosis Society. </blockquote> Note that the Bloomberg article was focused on InfoCision. I suspect that if one were able to look at arrangements with similar telemarketing firms made by all US health care charities, the results might be even more extreme. The Fund Raisers and the Charities Lied The article contained instances in which the telephone callers lied about who they were or about where the money they were trying to collect would go. First, regarding who the callers were: <blockquote>The ruse begins with the name that flashes on your caller ID when a telemarketer is phoning on behalf of a charity. It’s the charity’s name that often shows up, not that of the telemarketing firm. The misrepresentation can continue on the call itself. Solicitors in recordings obtained by the Ohio Attorney General’s Office sometimes identify themselves to potential donors as 'volunteers.' They’re not; they’re paid employees of InfoCision. </blockquote> Second, regarding where the money would go: <blockquote>The bigger lie telemarketers tell is what they say about how much money will go to the charities they’re working for. According to documents obtained through an open records request with the Ohio attorney general, the Diabetes Association approved a script for InfoCision telemarketers in 2010 that includes the following line: 'Overall, about 75 percent of every dollar received goes directly to serving people with diabetes and their families, through programs and research.' Yet that same year, InfoCision’s contract with the association estimated that the charity would keep just 15 percent of the funds the company raised; the rest would go to InfoCision. </blockquote> This deception appears to be sanctioned by the leaders of the charities for whom InfoCision worked, <blockquote>[American Diabetes] Association Vice President [Richard] Erb offers no apologies for the script, saying the association runs many fundraising campaigns and, overall, about 75 percent of the money goes to its programs. He acknowledges that the contract with InfoCision estimated that the telemarketer would get to keep 85 percent of the funds it raised. Erb also says he isn’t happy that volunteers are upset upon learning the truth. 'Obviously, if people feel betrayed or that we’re not being honest with them, it doesn’t make me feel well,' he says. </blockquote> The American Cancer Society similarly seemed to sanction deceptive fund raising practices. <blockquote>The Cancer Society, in a Sept. 1, 2009, contract with InfoCision, estimated that the charity would get 44 percent of the amount the company collected in the following fiscal year. The telemarketer script for the same year approved by the society for InfoCision asks solicitors to say something different: 'Overall, about 70 cents of every dollar received goes to the programs and services that we provide.' </blockquote> Predictably, an executive for the society dodged responsibility for such lying: <blockquote>[Greg] Donaldson, the society’s senior vice president, declined to comment on the contradiction between the contract and the script, saying the society doesn’t provide 'proprietary competitive information regarding individual programs.' </blockquote> The Telemarketing Firm Stonewalls While the Bloomberg reporters were able to get some health care "charity" executives to respond to the issues, InfoCision was not even slightly forthcoming. The best they could do was get an InfoCision executive to protest the company's importance for charity: <blockquote>InfoCision Chief of Staff Steve Brubaker says his company is vital to the success of charity fundraising. Many nonprofits have stayed with InfoCision for more than 20 years, proving the firm offers value and integrity, he says. 'We’ve developed that high level of trust by being good stewards of their money and mission,' he says. Campaigns to develop new donors are more expensive than those seeking money from previous supporters, he says. He declined to answer specific questions, saying such information is proprietary to the company or its clients. He turned down a request for interviews with Taylor and InfoCision executives. </blockquote> Previously, the company owner had taken on the mantle now familiar in the current US election campaign, "job creator," <blockquote>[InfoCision founder Gary] Taylor was an outspoken opponent of efforts by the Federal Trade Commission in 2003 to begin the National Do Not Call Registry, allowing people to block calls from for-profit solicitors. In an interview with Customer Interaction Solutions, a trade journal, he said: 'The most pressing issue, without a doubt, is excessive governmental regulation. It seems that the politicians and regulators are ignoring the significant benefits we provide through job creation, economic growth and the goods and services we cost-effectively market for our clients.' </blockquote> Keep in mind that the article documented how much of those jobs are minimum wage, and they may involve lying. Note further that Taylor "got his start raising money for evangelical preachers." The company also " did fundraising for Citizens United, the conservative group best known as the plaintiff in the Supreme Court case that allowed unlimited independent spending by corporations and unions on behalf of political candidates." Health Care Charities are Really Just "Businesses" Underlying all this seems to be the transformation of health care from a calling to a business. While US health care charities have reputations as organizations out to do good, one executive, the American Diabetes Soceiety's Mr Erb, admitted that doing good was no longer really the focus, <blockquote>'But the thing is, we’re a business. There has never been a time or a place where we said, 'Most of this money is coming to us.'' </blockquote> An expert the Bloomberg reporters interviewed said that the fund raising tactics these organizations used meant they were no longer charities. Per Ken Berger, "who runs Glen Rock, New Jersey- based Charity Navigator, the nation’s largest nonprofit watchdog group," <blockquote>'These organizations were created to provide public benefit,' he says. 'The fact that the vast majority of money is instead lining the pockets of telemarketers defies the whole reason behind the very creation of these charities.' </blockquote> The Experts Say It's Fraud Bloomberg reporters interviewed several experts on philanthropy and law. They were not amused. One suggested that the fund raising tactics described in the article were fraudulent: <blockquote>Charities should be held accountable for deceptive fundraising done in their name, says James Cox, a professor at the Duke University School of Law in Durham, North Carolina, and co-author of 'Cox and Hazen on Corporations' (Aspen Publishers, 2003). 'If that’s what they do systematically, then they’re obtaining money under false pretenses,' he says. 'I don’t just think it’s incredible. I’d be surprised if it isn’t criminal.' </blockquote> Another labeled the practices "deceitful." Bloomberg cited a 2003 US Supreme Court decision: <blockquote>While telephone solicitors have no obligation to volunteer what the firm’s cut is of each donation, they don’t have a constitutional right to lie, the court ruled in a 2003 Illinois case. 'States may maintain fraud actions when fundraisers make false or misleading representations designed to deceive donors about how their donations will be used,' the court said. </blockquote> Summary This horrendous story illustrates how the mission of health care has been undermined by the last 30 years' push to turn health care organizations into businesses at a time managers were indoctrinated that they only thing that matters is short-term revenue (that is, they have become "financialized," look <a href="http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/2012/04/health-care-dysfunction-explained-by.html">here</a>). Here we see ostensibly charitable organizations that solicit donations from the public supposedly to aid patients and support medical education and research willing to do whatever it takes to raise money, including deception, and what might be fraud. This is just disgusting. In my humble opinion, patients, health care professionals, and the public should insist that health care non-profit organizations disclose their fund-raising tactics, and abandon any that are dishonest. Law enforcement should investigate to see if prosecutions for fraud or related crimes are warranted. Organizations that refuse to change their ways should lose their tax exempt status. Meanwhile, I would suggest that everyone should be extremely skeptical of fund raising by major health care charities. In no instance should anyone give money solely based on telephone solicitations. If we, health care professionals, patients, the public do not take our heads out of the sand and realize how dishonest health care has become, we will have only ourselves to blame when it collapses.

How Big Health Care Charities Rely on Lying Telemarketers

A modern day Diogenes searching for an honest organization in health care would have a very hard time. Close to the "you can't mak...

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Duke Scientist Bringing Millions from NIH and Pharma Suspended Over Rhodes Scholar Claims

The New York Times reports that a medical researcher faked claims to being a Rhodes Scholar, and that a major scandal that has erupted. The scenario is very familiar to readers of Healthcare Renewal, with universities collecting millions from public sources and the pharmaceutical industry, turning a blind eye to credentials discrepancies of faculty "taxpayers", and the public possibly put at risk through faulty research and suspect "reviews": <blockquote><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/21/health/research/21cancer.html">Duke Scientist Suspended Over Rhodes Scholar Claims</a> New York Times July 20, 2010 Duke University School of Medicine has suspended a researcher and stopped patient enrollment in three cancer studies upon learning of reports that the researcher had overstated his academic credentials. One of the lead investigators on the cancer studies, Dr. Anil Potti, was placed on administrative leave, said Douglas J. Stokke, a spokesman for Duke, while the university investigates allegations that Dr. Potti had falsely claimed that he was a Rhodes scholar. The controversy erupted late last week after <a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://cancerletter.com/tcl-blog/CL36-27.pdf" title="Article in The Cancer Letter. (PDF)">an article published in The Cancer Letter</a> (PDF), a weekly publication for cancer specialists, reported that Dr. Potti, an assistant professor of medicine, had on occasion exaggerated his credentials. (A spokeswoman at Rhodes House at Oxford confirmed on Tuesday that Dr. Potti had not received the scholarship.) </blockquote> The scientist, Anil Potti, was engaged in cancer clinical trials using questionable and possbily erroneous analytical methods (prediction models). <blockquote>In addition, several dozen biostatisticians and cancer researchers at Harvard, Princeton, Johns Hopkins and other academic institutions are now questioning the methodology behind the three clinical trials, urging a halt to the Duke studies — two on lung cancer and one on breast cancer — in a letter sent to the director of the National Cancer Institute.</blockquote> He'd used the fake credentials to get American Cancer Society money: <blockquote> When questions about Dr. Potti’s credentials became public, the American Cancer Society suspended payments of a five-year, $729,000 grant awarded to Dr. Potti to study the genetics of lung cancer. The society awarded the grant based in part on a résumé from the doctor that included the Rhodes honor, said Dr. Otis W. Brawley, the chief medical officer of the cancer society. </blockquote> According to The Cancer Letter's exposé linked above: <blockquote>A high-profile cancer genomics researcher at Duke University claimed in multiple grant applications that he had been a Rhodes scholar, when, in fact, the Rhodes Trust states flatly that he was not. Documents obtained by The Cancer Letter show that in biographies submitted to NIH, Duke oncologist and genomics researcher Anil Potti claimed variously to have won the prestigious scholarship in 1995 or 1996, depending on the version of the biography. Potti also made the Rhodes claim in an application that resulted in a $729,000 grant from the American Cancer Society. “We don’t have any record that Anil Potti was a Rhodes scholar,” spokesman for the Rhodes Trust said to The Cancer Letter.</blockquote> Assuming the fabrications are proven, a number of questions arise: <ul><li>How can a Duke scientist have gotten away with exaggerated credentials on a CV used in a grant applicationa to NIH, the American Cancer Society, and perhaps other organizations, claiming to be a Rhodes Scholar? </li><li>Did he make similar exaggerations in his application to Duke itself?</li><li>Do the exaggerations made in NIH and/or other federal grant applications constitute a crime, e.g., under Title 18 of U.S. Code, Section 1001 which makes it a federal crime to make a false statement to the government, according to one contributor to The Cancer Letter article? </li><li>Will Duke act on fabrications as criminal matters? </li><li>What were the Duke grants office and/or credentials-checking staff doing during their working hours?</li><li>Why did this exaggeration come out in The Cancer Letter? </li></ul> Patients may be at risk: <blockquote> [MD Anderson Cancer Center biostatisticians] Keith Baggerly and Kevin Coombes said they devoted about 1,500 hours to checking Potti’s and Nevins’s work. These efforts—dubbed “forensic bioinformatics”—resulted in a paper in the November 2009, issue of the Annals of Applied Statistics. “Unfortunately, poor documentation can shift from an inconvenience to an active danger when it obscures not just methods but errors,” the paper stated. “Patients in clinical trials are currently being allocated to treatment arms on the basis of these results.” The two raised questions about Duke’s randomized phase II single-institution trials that used the Nevins and Potti technology to assign patients to treatment (NCT00545948, NCT00509366, and NCT00636441). Baggerly and Coombes argued that these trials “may be putting patients at risk.”</blockquote> Duke initially suspended but then restarted the trials after an "investigation" by outside scientists. However: <blockquote>Experts asked by The Cancer Letter to review these [investigation] documents [obtained under the FOIA] noted that Duke deans Cuffe and Kornbluth were inaccurate in their description of the document’s substance and conclusions when they announced completion of the investigation and resumption of the clinical trials earlier this year. “Having read the committee’s report, we must disagree with Duke’s representation of the committee’s findings,” Baggerly and Coombes said in an email after reviewing the documents released under FOIA. The committee stated that “In our review of the methods … we were unable to identify a place where the statistical methods were described in sufficient detail to independently replicate the findings of the papers,” and further noted that the Duke investigators “really need” to work on “clearly explaining the specific statistical steps used in developing the predictors and the prospective sample assignments."</blockquote> Duke has apparently now decided to stonewall: <blockquote> ... The Cancer Letter sent an email with questions to Potti, his collaborator Joseph Nevins, and Duke administration officials. The questions focused on the Rhodes claim, but also touched on other apparent discrepancies. Responding to everyone on the email CC list, including this reporter, Potti wrote: “Sounds like I need to call him to clarify ...... and probably also talk with you all to clarify. I was a nominee..... and several of the others can also be explained. –Anil.” After that email, Potti and Duke officials didn’t respond to questions seeking details that could substantiate this response. Multiple calls and emails from The Cancer Letter were not acknowledged.</blockquote> One reason is that this escapade appears to have many twists and turns regarding credentials claimed by their researcher in the past. See the full <a href="http://cancerletter.com/tcl-blog/CL36-27.pdf" title="Article in The Cancer Letter. (PDF)">article published in The Cancer Letter</a> (PDF). The tale is stunning. Another reason appears to be this: <blockquote>Genomic research led by the two scientists [Potti and senior collaborator Joseph Nevins] has brought millions of public and private dollars to Duke. The duo’s connections with the industry are considerable. According to a recent disclosure, Potti is a member of the scientific advisory boards of Eli Lilly and Co., GlaxoSmith-Kline, and CancerGuideDx.</blockquote> This also raises the questions: <ul><li>Did Potti misrepresent his credentials to these pharmas?</li></ul><ul><li>Was Nevins aware of these exaggerations himself? </li></ul> Of course this author is familiar with laxity in Duke's management and academics, and their not replying to pointed questions on their failures. Perhaps at the time of this grant application, Duke personnel were busy checking the credentials of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duke_lacrosse_case">Duke Lacrosse team</a>, or of academics such as myself, maligned by Duke professors for having a strong sense of ethics (see link below). I then found myself "stonewalled" by Duke's President <a href="http://www.duke.edu/president/">Richard H. Brodhead</a> on the issues. (See my Jan. 2008 post "<a href="http://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/2008/01/truly-disturbing-lawsuit-against-duke.html">A Truly Appalling Lawsuit Against Duke University</a>" for more on that affair.) -- SS

Duke Scientist Bringing Millions from NIH and Pharma Suspended Over Rhodes Scholar Claims

The New York Times reports that a medical researcher faked claims to being a Rhodes Scholar, and that a major scandal that has erupted. The ...

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