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A Wrongful Death: One Child's Fatal Encounter with Public Health and Private Greed

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Kafka lives and her name is Leon Bing. But the truly scary thing is that Bing's report on society - "A Wrongful Death: One Child's Fatal Encounter with Public Health and Private Greed" - is NON-FICTION. This could happen to any troubled teen - and it did. But what's even more interesting than how and why this 13 year old girl committed suicide while under professional medical care is how and why this book isn't getting reviewed! Attention authors and investigative journalists everywhere: you may have a story worthy of a Pulitzer or Nobel Prize - but how's it going to effect change if no one reads it?

One of the altruistic characteristics of Americans is our willingness to do whatever we can to help our troubled children. This book is a chilling yet passionate document of how a greedy callous medical corporation exploits our inclination toward good. If you've ever wanted to do something to help a disturbed kid, the first thing to do is read this book.

In "Do Or Die," Leon Bing took us to America's grittiest streets to reveal the world of gangsters. Now, she takes us to America's poshest -- and most lucrative -- hospitals, where 13-year-old Christy Scheck met an untimely end. Greed got us here. Bing recounts with a journalists eye for detail and motive how entreprenurial medicine rewards recruiters for putting "heads in beds" of teen psych wards. Private insurance, which pays top dollar to treat troubled yong people, is systematically exploited by medical speculators. Huge medical firms have refined the art of raising hysteria in parents, encouraging them to committ their adolescents for "symptoms" which are often only signs of growing up. What they neglect to do is properly train the "psych tech" staffers who monitor these kids in situations which can make them actually compete to appear the most pathological, whether they actually are or not. This is what happened to Christy Scheck. Bing traces her admittance for depression and hostility towards her parents. Since her father had military insurance, Christy got top-dollar billing, but not equvilant care. Placed on a dangerously high dosage of mid-altering drugs, this child may well have been driven to suicide by those paid to make her better. Christy's parents fought back, and the medical company fought dirty -- a tale of corporate crime Bing tells with riveting detail. Raising a troubled teenager is difficult. Losing one to an incompetent HMO is unbearable. Bing's cautionary tale is required reading for all parents, and for anyone worried about the direction of the modern American health care system.

I can relate to this book. The author did a fabulous job bringing this story to life. I was actually encouraged to write the book about the wrongful death of my son from reading this book. More books need to be written like this. It proves to the world that one should never put all their faith in a doctor or the system. Hats off to you.

This is a jaw-dropping account of a 13 year old girl's struggle inside a for-profit psychiatric hospital. Everyone needs to read this book - the story of Christy Scheck depicts in microcsm the direction our healthcare in America has taken: Greedy corporations taking advantage of a system that is ripe for corruption. You will be amazed at how far the profiteers from a 4 billion dollar medical corporation, National Medical Enterprises (NME), went in order to place profits over patients at the expense of ordinary troubled lives. This book is not about a third world country, not about another time in history, nor is it about gangsters. This is about America today and a 13 year old girl whose parents wanted only the best for her. Instead they got their worst nightmere. Christy Scheck was overmedicated, often restrained, and her treatment was carried out by an underqualified and undertrained staff in charge of more patients then they could handle. This book is about a company focused only on the bottom line. NME's obsession with that bottom line resulted in Christy Scheck's death at one of their facilties, Southwood Psychiatric Center. A Wrongful Death, a true story, is more frightening then any Stephen King novel. A must read for everyone.

I was one of those kids in Southwood. Wow does this book bring it back and now it all makes sense to me.

Christy Scheck did not have to die. The mental health system is getting better but there is so far to go. Especially in the eyes of the public. People with mental illness are not lepers, they just need medicine as a diabetic needs insulin. The general public is so ill-informed. This book is about this young girl who got caught up in the protocol of management and money and greed, and she did not have to die. There is hope and with movies like A Beautiful Mind and Girl, Interrupted and others, like Mike Wallace and Kim Basinger to bring mental health to the forefront of society, it will not hide behind the doors any longer, and will be dealt with in the dignified manner it deserves.

It's amazing and truly sad what greed and money does to people, at the expense of someone else's life and a families happiness.

First, a disclaimer.

I am one of the parties written about in this book. I worked this case along with a number of other National Medical Enterprises (NME, now known as Tenet Health care)fraud cases.

The author and I have had our differences with many of the conclusions she writes about Christy Scheck's direct care providers. The company slashed well qualified professionals from the staff, to replace them with interns, or students whose field of study was outside of their curriculum. While Leon Bing savages many of these front line staffers, those of us involved with the Scheck case, saw the immediate care personnel as a MASH unit, doing the best they could do, even though they did not have any training or oversight of the tasks they were left to fulfill.

But her portrayal of the nation wide fraud scheme put into place to meet Wall St. expectations is accurate, and can be verified by a number of ways, including the agreement between the US Justice department and NME to close 80 of its mental health facilities, pay a significant fine, terminate the founders and board members, and agree not to reenter the field for 5 years.

The initial review of the book is accurate. This is a true story of a for profit medical industry putting the bottom line over the patient, and in this case, was a direct result of the death of a 13 year old girl. The company itself, admitted this publicly as part of the settlement of Christy Scheck's estate. For a company to make such an admission is as rare as the sighting of Unicorns. Civil cases of this sort 99.9% of the time include language along the lines of: While not admitting liability, the defendant has agreed to pay the sum of (whatever). The wording is very important as it makes it more difficult for an injured party to use the settled case as part of their lawsuit.

NME admitted to billing for services they had not provided. To, as they put it "put heads on beds" under any circumstances, including admitting patients with no medical reason for their admission, billing for medical supplies and treatment not provided and not allowing a doctor to discharge a patient until every bit of insurance coverage had been drained. NME was not alone in this practice. It was industry wide resulting in the FBI & Department of Defense Criminal Investigation Division to investigate, Charter, Columbia, HCA, & Humana among others. I was involved in the investigation of those three of those corporations as well.

If you do not beleive our system needs to be reformed, or know someone who has that beleive, you need to read this book.

When you hear that much of the public option can be funded by strict oversight and cost containment, and find this implausible, this book will open your eyes to just how much fraud and unnecessary procedures occur. And contrary to many of the nay sayers,the bulk of these procedures were not done to protect the doctors from law suits. They were done simply because there was insurance coverage for the procedures. In many cases, no procedure was done, was not included in the patients' charts, but there were bills sent out for them, and reimbursement for those bills.


It's my opinion, having been a fraud investigator for a number of years, seeing first hand how publicly traded health industries need to meet Wall St. expectations, the length they will go to not to disappoint Wall St. passes off the the cost in large premiums, high deductibles, and denial of services your physician has ordered.

This isn't an overall indictment of all health care providers, an area Leon and I have a disagreement. I've found the bulk of hands on care providers I've met to have been caring people who want to do whats best for the patient, but insurance dictates their care.

This book can be picked up for under 5 dollars. It might be some of the most information on health care you will find, that was written well before the reforms being discussed today, and show you how much money the tax payers can save.

i read an article in Roling stone.. it in first paragraph stated the parents took this kid out of soccer coed... or something of that nature.. mostlikely the parents have all to do more with the death as much as the hospitals who take advantage .
i happend to be a honors student in art school no drugs or alchol and recovering frm bulima when my father intended to keep me from school by trying to tell a doctor iwas ill.despite he was told to leave me alone .. the next fifteen years of my life were draged into hospitals on lies and hysteria. i was subject to for no reason .. ect. and drugs and i had nt even suffered depression i was a higly educated and adjsuted happy person till my father began to do this.. he admitted this to but not to doctors my father was a md so it was easy to get away with this . my fahter was also a food aholic and gamblerand sick.. see a movie called terror in the family it goes into the lies parents tell of children and who realy is the sick person...
my life was destroyed by these places and i saw first hand what goes on and parents who realy need the places not kids who ar exposed to sick families dysfunction who are basicly reacting to an illness.....
they realy need to have the parents admitted along side the kid id they do this ...
i was kept sick for 115 years and negelcted of anything i said that would have saved me . as a reslut my life suffered ill from truama.... i saved my own life when i escaped this cycle of doctors looking for insurance. butthe effects of damge it left on my life eventuly despite i live about four to five years very happy super healty like i was before this happened i will now die from thethings that were done to me inthe years i was [mistreated] by this system.....
parents have all todo with this kids death .. if they were functional parents they would not need a shrink . they mighttry communcation and being honest with them self.. somewhere they failed and it is not just the system...