[krisoft]

I like the idea of that proposal, but I'm not sure how it would work in practice.

The problem is that the crooked dentist will argue that the "bait" patient has in fact have cavities. And then if the prosecutor finds somehow convincing evidence that the patient does not actually have cavities the crooked dentist can change tactic and say it was a honest mistake on their part.

With other crimes where "sting operations" work the situation is much more clear cut. The target of the drug sting is either selling drugs or not selling drugs. If you find drugs you can easily prosecute them. With the dental scam even if you manage to catch them red handed once, it is still a long and complicated process to prove it was a scam and not a mistake.

Or alternatively we can legislate to make making mistakes with dental diagnosis illegal the same way having large batches of drugs is illegal. That will make the prosecution easier, but will have all kind of other negative consequences.

[mandmandam]

It could be done. You do a first pass of a significant number of dentists, with people with confirmed healthy teeth, and then do a second pass on every dentist who recommends fillings. Caught scamming twice? License suspension. Repeat offender? Jail time. The odds of such a program putting an innocent dentist in jail gotta be near-nil.

There's no shortage of people who would damn-near volunteer for the work, given how many of us have had multiple run-ins with crooked dentists.

Even if it cost, say, $10k to catch each scumbag dentist, the ROI to society would be tremendous. Catch enough dentists in the space of a few months, apply appropriate consequences, and the whole culture will change.

That said, in reality the dentists would 'hire lobbyists' to kill anything like this.

[krisoft]

Hmmmm. I like this.

Could it be done as a non-profit perhaps? I mean we clearly can’t do the licence suspension and the jail time that way but we could maybe shame the scammers?

[mandmandam]

Hahaha I love it. Extinction Rebellion but for dentists? ... How about "Extraction Action"?

The main issue I foresee is that there's just so much to be outraged about in the world now. People are using shameful behavior to distract from worse shames - it's been weaponized!

So, making a significant impact in a crowded 'shame market', across a tightly controlled media landscape, generally requires a highly skilled dedicated team.

I was wondering about this problem since this thread; specifically, wouldn't it be rather easy to use big data techniques to catch dentists who are way outside norms?

And after looking into it, it seems that insurance companies, Medicaid etc have been doing exactly this, and catching some pretty big fish. It's new for me to give insurance companies much credit for doing anything good, and I feel weird now. Real enemy of my enemy stuff.