TAKE THE MONEY AND RUN. Two whistleblowers will receive $8.1 million for reporting Medicare fraud in Redding, California. Tenant Healthcare Corp. has agreed to pay the U.S. a whopping $54 million to settle. Now that’s what I call fraud. It obviously was profitable.

IT’S A CRUEL WORLD OUT THERE. Remember the old saw about not going to the hospital because it will make you sick, just look at the people there? Well, it is true. Here are some examples of our beloved health care providers continuing to run amok. First, In Massachusetts, poor Audrey Serrano was told she had HIV and began treatment in 1994. The drugs caused her many problems, including colitis and an hysterectomy, not to mention the mental stress of thinking you will get AIDS and die. She began to question her status when she noticed that several of her tests indicated negative results. She went to another clinic and got retested. Guess what, she does not have HIV. Now that’s cruel.

Also in California (remind me not to go there for medical treatment, will you), a San Diego plastic surgeon is in some hot water. It seems he removed and replaced breast implants without anesthesia. Yeoow! He cut off a patient’s ear lobe during a face lift. Hey, you said you wanted to look different! The local medical board is considering whether to relieve him of his license. How much consideration does that take? This is stuff that violates the Geneva convention in wartime. If Saddam did this, we would call it torture. This guy actually got paid to torture people. It’s a shame he is not a Catholic priest, though. Doctors should learn from them. They would just take this guy and move him to another state, set him up in practice, and not tell anybody about his problems.

Here is the third horror story. A pharmacy is Connecticut filled a prescription for paregoric. Instead they gave her tincture of opium, which has 25 times more morphine. The customer took one teaspoon and died. But, you’ll be happy to know the pharmacist received a reprimand and must take some classes on error prevention. I think they should make the pharmacist undergo plastic surgery in San Diego. I can recommend a good doctor.