A former Clearwater doctor, forced to give up her medical license, is headed to federal prison. In U.S. District Court in Tampa on Wednesday, Jayam Iyer admitted she stole money from taxpayers by cheating Medicare and begged for leniency. Judge James Moody sentenced Iyer to six months in prison, three years of supervised release and ordered her to pay $52,436.02 restitution.
She was told that her brother was dying, so Shirell Powell hurried to St. Barnabas Hospital in the Bronx in July. The prognosis was bad, Powell was told, she claims in a recently filed lawsuit. Her brother, Frederick Williams, was unconscious from an apparent drug overdose and had severe brain damage. Doctors didn’t think he was going to survive, she said she was told.
Robert Montgomery is passed out, asleep on a gurney in a hospital gown. He’s just had a heart biopsy, his seventh since a heart transplant he received here at NYU Langone Health three months earlier. Dr. Montgomery isn’t just any patient. He is the director of NYU Langone’s Transplant Institute. And he didn’t receive just any heart transplant. It was from a heroin user who died of a drug overdose and had hepatitis C, a disease Dr. Montgomery subsequently contracted and has already recovered from.
There’s the typical doctor’s office at Massachusetts General Hospital: Ivy League diplomas. Neatly stacked medical journals. Tastefully framed family photos. And then there’s Dr. Alice Flaherty’s office: Old tools hang on pegboards. Animal bones decorate shelves. Grow lights shine on kumquat, strawberry, and tomato plants.
On the morning of September 17, 2009, Darren Sewell left his office at Freedom Health, the Tampa health-insurance company where he was a vice-president, and climbed into his Chevy Tahoe. He drove to Sonny’s BBQ, a restaurant nearby, where he picked up barbecue sauce for the sandwich he had brought for lunch.
Three hours along a bumpy dirt road from the capital of Rwanda, a new medical school is emerging from the unlikeliest of places — a small hilltop in the poor farming village of Butaro. The school’s name reveals its ambitious mission: The University of Global Health Equity. It aims to transform both medical education and medical care for the rural poor in central Africa and to serve as a model for more equitable health care around the globe.