Casey Smitherman is superintendent of a small school district in the Midwest. The town, Elwood, Indiana, has 8,500 people and struggles with serious poverty. Many of its students do not have adequate resources.
Ms. Smitherman had helped a specific student in the past, buying clothes for him and helping clean his house.
This specific student failed to show up at school. Smitherman apparently did not want to call the state’s Department of Child Services because she was concerned the child might be placed in a foster home. She learned the child had a sore throat and she took him to an urgent care clinic. The clinic refused to treat the student because he was not her child.
Well, the superintendent took the child to another medical facility and checked him in for evaluation using her son’s name. She was given an antibiotic prescription and filled it at a pharmacy, again using her son’s name.
The total bill for treatment was $233.
Smitherman was arrested for various derivatives of insurance fraud, including official misconduct and identity deception.
To be clear, Smitherman has not tried to spin her story. She said what she did was wrong.
She is being put into a pretrial diversion program, so if her record stays clean, the charges will be expunged from her record.
It’s not clear to me why a representative of the school was not empowered through some type of implicit or explicit consent mechanism to provide permission for treatment. In most school districts, if there is an accident or serious illness at school, teachers or school nurses are allowed to act.
Yes, the total charge was modest. Still, if Smitherman wanted to provide charity, she should have footed the bill herself. It is insurance fraud to misrepresent one’s identity to obtain benefits. The reason is obvious.
There’s little doubt Smitherman wanted to help the child, just as she had done in the past. If the stumbling block is obtaining permission to treat the child, she should figure out how that might be addressed going forward. If it is the cost of care, that might be beyond her pay grade.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jeffrey Segal, MD, JD
Dr. Jeffrey Segal, Chief Executive Officer and Founder of Medical Justice, is a board-certified neurosurgeon. In the process of conceiving, funding, developing, and growing Medical Justice, Dr. Segal has established himself as one of the country’s leading authorities on medical malpractice issues, counterclaims, and internet-based assaults on reputation.
Dr. Segal received his M.D. from Baylor College of Medicine, where he also completed a neurosurgical residency. Dr. Segal served as a Spinal Surgery Fellow at The University of South Florida Medical School. He is a member of Phi Beta Kappa as well as the AOA Medical Honor Society. Dr. Segal received his B.A. from the University of Texas and graduated with a J.D. from Concord Law School with highest honors.
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The system has become so complicated that …no one knows “how to fly it!” and the auto-pilot has serious flaws (known to the designers but ignored, hidden, covered-up…).
Sound familiar?
1) The superintendent should have just paid cash and this would never have gotten to the legal realm.
2) She did not have medical clearance to treat the child so that was not okay.
If she could not get medical clearance from a parent or guardian then the child should have been put into foster care temporarily.
3) The superintendent was trying to do the right thing by doing the wrong thing. Should this have ever gone to the legal system? No she should have paid the insurance charges, paid a fine, gotten a summons, and that would be it.
4) The school nurse programs have been cut back because of a lack of funding by the government to the local health departments that provide the nurses to schools. The health departments are just getting squeezed for funding.
A generous reading of the 10th amendment and case law that follows it would shed much light here. Derivations are left to the reader.
Why was she afraid that the student would be put into foster care? Were his parent(s) not available to obtain permission from? Unfortunately, with our incredibly litigious society today, often the permission for someone else to obtain care for our children often needs to be notarized. Often parents, especially if they are poor financially or educationally, don’t know where to do this or have no access to a notary. So perhaps she was trying to be expedient? I believe she said he was her son, not so much to have her insurance pay for anything but to be able to get him treatment. She then probably felt she had to keep up the charade at the pharmacy. I can understand why she did what she did, even though it was wrong. Insurance companies don’t give a damn about circumstances, but I believe she should pay the insurance company back their $233, apologize and swear up and down that she will never do that again. Then she should have all of the parents in her school fill out forms giving teachers, nurses, etc in the school permission to seek and/ or obtain medical treatment for the students as needed in the event that the parents are unreachable.
Kick her butt then pat her back.
In my view, the superintendent overstepped her boundaries in many ways. Apparently, she drove to the child’s house and took it upon herself to visit 2 clinics without parental consent. If the child were home alone with a fever, sore throat, and possibly in danger, the super should have called the police if a guardian could not be reached. This story had unhappy ending written all over it Bad judgement. Thank you.