Feeling Helpless with Corruption, US Doctor Commits Suicide

Corruption in medical practices is common in India but it is also a growing concern in countries across the globe. We are aware of Indian surgeons who refuse to operate till they get a commission for the surgery in the form of either cash or for getting surgical materials as per their choice of the company with whom they are tied up for commission. Similarly, corruption exists while ordering investigations outside the hospital when the testing equipment is not available in the hospital. There are cuts or kick-backs for ordering the investigations in a particular private laboratory. In an alleged case of corrupt doctors in a hospital in Florida, a doctor committed suicide after feeling frustrated and failing to find a solution.

Dr Steve Ortiz, a spinal surgeon from Florida, was known by his colleagues and patients as a kindhearted, gentle man who always had smile on his face and never refused to make time for them. It is quite clear from testimonials of his patients that Dr Ortiz was not a man who gave up on his patients. Susan Kreischer was a patient of Dr Ortiz and was undergoing treatment for her back problems. She said, “When I had more back problems, Dr Ortiz said I’d need my hip fused and that he’d look for another surgeon since that wasn’t a procedure he was familiar with. Next time I saw him he told me that he didn’t find anyone he could trust so he was going to do it himself - and that’s exactly what he did. He learned that procedure for me! I was in awe that he did that for me.” The operating room staff were also in awe of Dr Ortiz and nobody could believe how perfectly he had performed her fusion. Which doctor would take the effort to learn a procedure just for a patient?

The most unforgettable story about Dr Ortiz is the way he dealt with a pothole in the hospital parking lot. No spine surgeon wants patients bouncing up and down in potholes. Since the hospital did not seem to have any plans to repair it, Dr Ortiz went to the local hardware store, bought several bags of cement and gravel, then fixed it himself early one morning and that too before a full day of surgery.

It should not be a surprise that such a doctor was fighting an internal battle with corrupt doctors in his hospital. Allegedly, Dr Ortiz had irreconcilable differences with the hospital leadership and was even considering moving on to another practice.

According to hospital staff, everything changed on February 7, 2017 when Dr Ortiz received a phone call in the doctors’ lounge. Staff said he was white as a ghost and believed that he must have been “threatened or something”.

To this day, nobody knows what happened on that phone call.

Dr Ortiz texted his surgical nurse, Sherry Cleveland, asking for her personal email address.

That evening around 5:00pm was the last time Dr Ortiz called his mother and told her, “They are greedy, that’s all they care about.”

His mother has since stated that Dr Ortiz was very upset that day. During that 30-minute call, Dr Ortiz shared with his mother the challenges he faced everyday. His mother was not aware of any of his struggles in the workplace prior to that conversation. The next day, Sherry Cleveland woke up early for work and, though she never checks her email early in the morning, that day, thinking that Dr Ortiz might have sent her something, she opened her mail. Dr Ortiz’s goodbye letter had arrived at 12:09am and it read as follows:

“Sorry to leave this up to you, but wanted to say goodbye and thank you to everyone at the hospital, and I am asking you to say goodbye for me. I really enjoyed working with everyone, and truly appreciated everyone’s hard work and dedication to my patients. I have some decent offers to stay in the area, but just cannot muster up the energy to change practices again. Because of my recruitment agreement, I have to stay in the area until Nov, 2018. If I stay, I won’t get referrals from docs and the practice will continue to struggle.

I left my last practice because the surgeons there were doing unnecessary surgery, and now I have landed in a place where I am coerced to withhold care from patients. Just can’t win I guess. So, after all that, I have decided to check out.

Was great working with you, always enjoyed your sense of humour and of course appreciated how well you took care of my patients.”

Dr Ortiz was found dead in his truck. On Wednesday morning, at 2:00am, Dr Ortiz checked on all his patients and wrote orders to make certain they were taken care of. At approximately 3:00am, he went out to the hospital parking lot where he repaired the pothole, sat down in his truck and shot himself in the heart. Dr Ortiz was found dead in his truck. On Wednesday morning, at 2:00am, Dr Ortiz checked on all his patients and wrote orders to make certain they were taken care of. At approximately 3:00am, he went out to the hospital parking lot where he repaired the pothole, sat down in his truck and shot himself in the heart.

Dr Ortiz could not play the game of corruption—harming patients for profit. He had asked other physicians for help—even met with the Hospital Board of Directors—and he was told to just 'go with the flow'. In frustration, Dr Ortiz had even reached out to government officials and the FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation), from whom he never received any response. After exploring all the possible options and arriving at a dead end, he saw no solution in sight. He decided to rather commit suicide than play the game by someone else’s rules. According to his colleagues and family, he was a truth teller and was biting his tongue just to survive. Dr Ortiz died as a whistleblower, feeling that suicide was the only way to draw attention to and bring an end to corruption.

“He was 47 when he finished his fellowship and was very naive having spent most of his life in school,” said his mother. “Steve was glad his training was over so he could be a real doctor. He felt alone in Florida. He had only been out of training for three years and was very disillusioned. He was not a quitter. He just could not deal with the corruption at his age.”

Journalists in the US have reported on his suicide but there has been no detailed investigation into his death. Dr Ortiz is one of tens of thousands of doctors trapped in corrupt US health systems, caught between for-profit insurers, unethical administrators and shareholders demanding maximum profit extraction from the sickest, most vulnerable patients. Without a proper investigation of the corruption leading to this surgeon’s suicide, there is no way to protect patients or prevent the next doctor’s suicide.