About the Author:
Malcolm K. Sparrow teaches Regulatory and Enforcement Strategy, and Analytic Methods, at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government. Formerly a Detective Chief Inspector with the British police service, he now specializes in issues of enforcement strategy, regulatory compliance, and risk control--he is the acknowledged national expert on the subject of Health Care Fraud. He is author of The Risk Business: Defining the Regulatory Craft (2000), License to Steal: Why Fraud Plagues America's Health Care System (1996), Imposing Duties: Government's Changing Approach to Compliance (1994); and co-author of B eyond 911: A New Era for Policing (1990) and Ethics in Government: The Moral Challenge for Public Leadership (1990).
From Booklist:
One of the sidelights to the debate over health-care reform is the media attention, often sensational, devoted to fraud. Sparrow, a public-policy lecturer at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and coauthor of a book about community policing entitled Beyond 911 (1990), contends that fraud in our health-care system is rampant. Despite his tabloidlike title, Sparrow takes a serious, often technocratic look at the industry's efforts at fraud control--and the lack thereof. He focuses on provider fraud as opposed to patient fraud, arguing that the former outpaces the latter by exponential proportions. He shows that most safeguards are designed to detect the abuse of overbilling rather than criminal fraud by those who "correctly" bill for procedures not even performed on patients who may not even exist. Sparrow also warns that electronic claims processing will worsen the problem because it will enable fraud to be committed faster, long before it can be detected. License to Steal adds an important dimension to the issue of health-care reform. David Rouse
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