Dr. John Natale of Illinois graduated with honors from Loyola University, graduated medical school from Northwestern University School of Medicine and went on to complete eight years of arduous postgraduate study to become a highly trained thoracic and cardiovascular surgeon. For over 20 years he practiced his specialty at a hospital in Illinois, doing extremely complicated cases, including treating ruptured aortic aneurysms. Although these cases have greater than 10 percent intraoperative mortality in the recognized medical literature, Dr. Natale never lost a patient on the operating table.
Yet today, Dr. Natale is in a federal penitentiary – not for monetary fraud, not for damage to the patient, not for inappropriate conduct, but for writing an operative report that may not have reflected exactly what he did in the case. Or perhaps more accurately, for daring to defy Uncle Sam’s Medicare mobsters....