Doctor pays a price for coming forward about his wrongdoing

The cone of silence his attorney placed over Dr. Ben Venger has been lifted, and the neurosurgeon and I are once again speaking.

Venger and his attorney, George Kelesis, contend he's receiving unduly harsh punishment for admitting his own wrongdoing.

"I made a mistake. I did something wrong. I regretted it, and I came forward to make the community better. And I got my teeth kicked in for it," Venger said, referring to the newspaper coverage of his admissions on the stand in the Noel Gage trial.

He doesn't complain about paying $3 million to the government as punishment. That's about one year's income.

But after the trial ended, Sunrise Hospital, where he does the majority of his surgeries, started the process to consider revoking his hospital privileges. While he hasn't yet heard from the Board of Medical Examiners about any potential discipline, he will.

Venger wants the public to consider his perspective.

He admitted accepting kickbacks and committing perjury to help increase settlement costs for Gage, a Las Vegas personal injury attorney. The jury hung 8-4 in favor of prosecution. (And I'm still hoping one of them gives me a call to explain the split.)

But Ben Venger is emphatic: "I never endangered any patients. I never violated any HIPAA (federal privacy) laws." Nothing he did wrong involved patient care, he said repeatedly.

He admits he was greedy and wrong to accept more than $400,000 from Howard Awand, the middleman who referred to Gage the Carlos Pachas malpractice case worth $18 million.

"I referred that to Howard without expectation of getting money back," Venger said.

However, when the money was offered, he didn't say no.

At the time he was taking kickbacks from Awand, malpractice rates were soaring. The state's biggest medical malpractice insurer was pulling out of Nevada, potentially leaving him and other doctors without malpractice coverage, which would mean they couldn't practice. Venger was angry about it.

One misconception I had before Venger testified: I thought he was Awand's merry tipster, picking up the phone and calling Awand with potential malpractice cases he heard about so he would get a kickback.

That wasn't the way it happened.

In the Pachas case, the only case where he said he took kickbacks, his wife, JoAnn, called him while he was in surgery and said a friend had called her about someone with a malpractice problem. He quickly told her to contact Awand and went back to surgery.

It sounded far more disgusting in pre-trial court documents than it did when he testified.

I'd also long wondered what made Ben Venger call it quits with Awand and Gage. At the trial, that became clear: Threats to JoAnn.

She said Gage and Awand threatened her in the fall of 2003 when she came to pick up a $216,000 kickback for the Pachas referral. Afterward, she called her husband and said she would have nothing more to do with Awand and Gage.

The couple went to the FBI in 2005 after rumors began circulating about an FBI investigation into doctors and lawyers conspiring to drive up medical costs in malpractice cases. He was given immunity.

"The most important thing I did: I said enough," Venger said.

He might be a victim of bad timing.

While he's not one of the doctors involved with the endoscopy clinic scandal, the Board of Medical Examiners might want to be tough on him to rebut the popular belief the board tends to be soft on disciplining doctors.

If Venger does lose his hospital privileges or medical license after coming forward voluntarily and admitting his wrongdoing while others deny, deny, deny, I doubt whether any doctor in this town will ever come forward to admit wrongdoing. The code of secrecy whereby doctors cover for each other will continue unabated.

Nobody's condoning what Venger did. But he shouldn't be a scapegoat either because the endoscopy scandal has made certain doctors look like greedy sleazebags.

I don't know the proper punishment for Ben Venger, but it should be fair, not a knee-jerk reaction. Hospital officials and state regulators should think about whether his punishment causes others to close their eyes out of fear of losing their ability to practice medicine.

Unless, of course, that's their goal.

Jane Ann Morrison's column appears Monday, Thursday and Saturday. E-mail her at Jane@reviewjournal.com or call (702) 383-0275.