Watchdog roundup: Paintings, doctors, livers, for sale…?

July 7th, 2009, 2:00 pm · Post a Comment · posted by Teri Sforza, Register staff writer

We’ve run across some thought- and/or outrage-provoking stuff over the past couple of days, which we wanted to share with you:

LIVER FOR SALE? The Wall Street Journal reports: “Apple Inc. CEO Steve Jobs’s decision to travel to Tennessee for a liver highlights the significant disparities in transplant waiting times across the country — the source of a longstanding controversy over the fairest way to distribute scarce organs.”
PAINTINGS FOR SALE? The Los Angeles Times reports: The Orange County Museum of Art sold 18 California Impressionist paintings to a private collector for $963,000 recently - about half of what the paintings might have fetched on the open market. That they used to belong to the Laguna Art Museum just adds fuel to the fires.
DOCTORS FOR SALE? The Los Angeles Times reports: “Investigators are focusing on at least five doctors who prescribed drugs to Michael Jackson as they try to unravel the circumstances surrounding the pop star’s death.”
‘SO BIASED AND SO NEGATIVE.’ Our colleague Jennifer Muir reports how the county’s public administrator/public guardian John Williams - who winds down the affairs of the deceased, and oversees care for elderly and mentally ill people who can’t care for themselves - defends himself against charges that he mismanaged his office.
CHASING A DISASTER CHASER. The Los Angeles Times reports: ”The man with the sharp suit and smile was half a step ahead of his own disaster, a cyclone of angry customers, subcontractors, lawyers, banks and state regulators. They accuse him of being a special brand of con artist, one who preys both on insurers and those already devastated by catastrophe. The Times found dozens of fraud complaints, lawsuits and government investigations targeting (Steve) Slepcevic and his Rancho Palos Verdes-based company, Paramount Disaster Recovery, spanning six states over the last decade. In California alone, insurance companies have filed 22 fraud complaints since 2002, records show.”