A question of “Ethics”
What is your price?
I try to look at motives, the behind the scenes machinations why a position is taken & make it a point not to be influenced unduly by any personal consideration or gain. Well, I try anyway but not always successfully. Claiming to be holier than thou is not realistic.
I am sure that my outspokenness on here has put off a few potential clients but there is only so much I can compromise on. Wired goes into it in a little more detail.
Radical forms of transparency are now the norm at startups - and even some Fortune 500 companies. It is a strange and abrupt reversal of corporate values. Not long ago, the only public statements a company ever made were professionally written press releases and the rare, stage-managed speech by the CEO. Now firms spill information in torrents, posting internal memos and strategy goals, letting everyone from the top dog to shop-floor workers blog publicly about what their firm is doing right - and wrong.
“You can’t hide anything anymore,” Don Tapscott says. Coauthor of The Naked Corporation, a book about corporate transparency, and Wikinomics, Tapscott is explaining a core truth of the see-through age: If you engage in corporate flimflam, people will find out. He ticks off example after example of corporations that have recently been humiliated after being caught trying to conceal stupid blunders.
No, this post is not brought on by any major crises of faith or ethical dilemmas & I am not aware of the location of a smoking gun.
But just how far will people go to hide negative opinions, especially if personal gain is involved?
I recently posted a few comments on a major newspaper’s website, nothing libellous or close to but pointing out mistakes / economies with the truth of one of their star columnists. None of the comments made it past moderation. Once is possibly an error, twice less likely to be so. More than that & there is likely to be something going on.
Today, I posted on a site that takes in quite a bit in industry sponsorship. The comment questioned the value of a particular transaction & drew attention to its poor record of performance. No show. I can only think that the fear of offending an advertiser was greater than the commitment to telling the truth.
Hiding from the truth doesn’t make it less correct or even go away. Intellectual honesty is a pre-requisite.
I just have less respect for this site now.
Everything comes with a price tag & the bill has to be paid at one time or another.
The co-founder of iSoft, the embattled IT company at the heart of the government’s troubled £6.2bn NHS IT upgrade project, was sacked yesterday after being suspended since the beginning of August.
The company said Steve Graham, former commercial director, had been “removed as a director” and had “ceased to be an employee of iSoft.” This move follows his suspension on full pay of £385,000 from August 8, “following an initial investigation into possible accounting irregularities in the financial years ended 30 April 2004 and 2005.” Another employee was suspended alongside Mr Graham, but the company refused to disclose their identity. A spokesman for the company said the financial terms for Mr Graham’s departure had not yet been agreed, but added: “It is not our intention to pay any compensation.”
As I do for the BMA or the Royal Colleges, especially after their behaviour over the years.
I am not capable of the cognitive dissonance, the moral bankruptcy of the position that “I’m al-right jack” & that other peoples problems are of no consequence.
The MDU guidance on the Electronic Patient Record is worth considering fully. It is difficult for me to understand how anyone who considers fully the positions being eluded can go along with current CfH plans.
“GPs will need to consider, therefore, whether they can rely on implied consent, or whether they need to seek express consent from their patients in order to upload their data onto the summary care record.
“GPs will need to consider a number of things. They will need, for example, to satisfy themselves that the CfH [Connecting for Health] publicity campaign had indeed reached all their patients, that all their patients had read and understood the leaflets and, if the GP had not heard from them, had decided not to seek an appointment with the GP to ask any questions, and not to ‘opt out’.â€
E Health Insider touches upon it in detail.
In clinical medicine, these are the current ethical transgressions that are being ignored. Is a life in the “Third World” any less sacrosanct than one in the West?
And this is what we are being led towards, by misdirection. To pretend that this is an aberration is to lie.
Tens of thousands of elderly Americans have received life-prolonging care as a result of their long-term-care policies. With more than eight million customers, such insurance is one of the many products that companies are pitching to older Americans reaching retirement.
Yet thousands of policyholders say they have received only excuses about why insurers will not pay. Interviews by The New York Times and confidential depositions indicate that some long-term-care insurers have developed procedures that make it difficult — if not impossible — for policyholders to get paid. A review of more than 400 of the thousands of grievances and lawsuits filed in recent years shows elderly policyholders confronting unnecessary delays and overwhelming bureaucracies. In California alone, nearly one in every four long-term-care claims was denied in 2005, according to the state.
“The bottom line is that insurance companies make money when they don’t pay claims,†said Mary Beth Senkewicz, who resigned last year as a senior executive at the National Association of Insurance Commissioners. “They’ll do anything to avoid paying, because if they wait long enough, they know the policyholders will die.â€
Insurance companies make money when few people claim successfully. The $1.6 billion dollars that the chairman of United Health was paid over 14 years needed to come from somewhere.
April 1st, 2007 at 11:15 am
[...] Frontpointsystems, which has consistently provided up to date analysis of MTAS and MMC turns to A Question of Ethics. I am sure that my outspokenness on here has put off a few potential clients but there is only so much I can compromise on. [...]
April 5th, 2007 at 8:31 am
[...] have previously pointed out the weak ethical foundations of clinical trials in deprived markets. The scandal has triggered a bout of hand-wringing in local and national media [...]