National Medical Enterprises Inc. Case Study Summary

National Medical Enterprises, Inc. (NME) was established by Richard K Eamer in the 1960’s, due the implementation of Medicare and Medicaid programs. Eamer was not a hands-on manager, but had very high expectations of the hospitals and created goals that he expected to be meet. Throughout the duration of the NME we learned about many of unethical decisions made by Eamer and his executives. The ethical culture of NME was focused on doing what ever it took to reach financial goals created by Eamer. This culture was established by the rewards for reaching goals as well as the lack of respect when the goals were not reached. The goals lead NME to make unethical decisions such as over charging patents and offering payments to probation officers, and physicians for referrals. The company was focused on thing and on the only and that was making money. This is a very unfortunate ethical culture for a hospital to have, NME should have been more focused on helping
The first change that needs to be meet is for Eamer to respect his employees and the hard work they do for the company. Second, NME needs to treat ever patient the same and not over charge insurance companies. And third, stop paying physicians referral fees. All of these actions show NME’s poor values, that I believe have been established by Eamer and his way of doing business. The bigger issue here is that NME’s strategies were unethical to the psychiatric hospitals. The fact that patients were being over charged and even hospitalized when it was not necessary is very unethical. The patients that came to NME were there because they needed help, but instead they were taken advantage of. It was also unethical for the patients to be referred to NME due to others making money rather then being known as a good psychiatric hospitals. As a hospital these behavior would be considered unethical on NME’s