[ingenuous2]

I agree with you. But there are competitive advantages in a cutthroat industry to being unethical, so over time, it's mostly the bad actors that have the fattest margins and can make plenty of money before getting caught.

Just like any industry, people accept it because it's just what happens. So busy being a business owner that you cannot afford to be Sheriff.

[Joeri]

You can make this argument for a lot of crimes: bank robberies are lucrative so over time more and more bad actors will become bank robbers. Except that doesn't happen because bank robbers are pursued vigorously.

If there's a zero tolerance policy against drugs there should be a zero tolerance policy against people providing bogus care for drug addicts. Just like you can judge a society by how it treats its weak, you can judge it by which crimes it pursues vigorously and which ones it lets slide.

[hueving]

>If there's a zero tolerance policy against drugs there should be a zero tolerance policy against people providing bogus care for drug addicts.

Unlike the bank robbery case, it gets difficult to tell the difference between incompetence and intentionally crappy care. Nobody accidentally robs a bank because they were poorly trained.

This makes it harder to have a government policy of charging everyone with a felony that provided poor care.

[ada1981]

Also, unlike bank robbery which is usually committed by poor folks, insurance fraud of this type is a white collar crime committed by (typically white) wealthy folks.

I was watching an old George Carlin video on the death penalty yesterday. He was ranting about how folks want to expand the death penalty for drug dealers. His bit was that you should expand the death penalty for the bankers who launder the money and the drug trade would pretty much stop immediately.

[maxerickson]

The US spends tens of billions of dollars a year on substance abuse treatment. In that context $58 million of fraud could be taken as evidence of fairly vigorous pursuit.

[literallycancer]

It doesn't happen because bank robberies are not lucrative. The expected outcome is negative, since the chance of getting caught is too high, or the loot is too low. You can change either of those things, and it's much easier to change the second one, especially in an era when most money isn't physically present in the bank anyway.