With Kendall there were parties and social invitations, even though many people wondered, as one acquaintance put it, "what she was doing with him." But he never quite made it back inside:"I went to a party at their house, one of those art groups," says the friend."I just remember that it was a big party with big money but kind of sleazy people. Girls with surgeries, like they might have had a background in exotic dancing.You know what I mean."
Through all this tumult, both social and professional, there is no evidence that Scheffey altered even a small part of the work behavior that had caused him so much trouble. It seemed that Scheffey's practice had never operated quite so efficiently, relying upon an elaborate network of enablers that included fellow surgeons, nurses, radiologists, anesthesiologists, and a system of insurance and workers' comp approvals that was easily gamed. The TWCC, which, in effect, controlled 90 percent of his revenue, not only allowed him to continue but failed to challenge him when he was asking for approval (in one case, for the fifteenth surgery on a patient). Once the TWCC approved it, there was little anyone could do.
Scheffey had also found the perfect home for the sort of work he did: a facility in Pasadena called Vista Medical Center Hospital. Vista was owned by a publicly traded Houston company called Dynacq Healthcare, whose main line of business was high-volume surgery. Dynacq, in fact, made both the Forbes and Fortune lists of the one hundred fastest-growing companies in 2002 on the strength of its astounding 47 percent annual growth rate over a three-year period. In a 2003 article in Barron's, company spokesman Jim Baxter boasted that "a very active surgeon might be able to do five spinal surgeries in a day." It is unclear if he was referring specifically to Scheffey, but he may as well have been. In one deposition, a Vista nurse said that Scheffey would often have two operating rooms going at the same time. So dependent was Vista on Scheffey that when his license was later suspended, in 2003, his absence led to dropping profits, which had a direct impact on Dynacq's bottom line.
Vista was also remarkably undiscriminating in whom it allowed to use its facilities. In 2001 Vista became the last hospital in Houston (of twenty at one time or another) to let Scheffey operate. According to a 2004 report by the Texas Department of State Health Services, Vista not only failed to check on its doctors' records and on lawsuits against them but also knowingly allowed Scheffey to perform surgeries in 1999 and 2000 as the main surgeon and without a monitor, in violation of his probation. In response to a detailed and lengthy written query from this magazine, Dynacq spokesperson Christina Gutel would say only: "Dr. Eric Scheffey was licensed by the Texas State Board of Medical Examiners during his tenure at Vista Medical Center Hospital. As soon as that board suspended his license, his surgical privileges were revoked at Vista Medical Center Hospital."
All the while, of course, the list of Scheffey's victims only grew longer. In 2001 he'd operated on Thomas T. "Buddy" King after King had injured his back in a truck accident. Instead of the four hours the operation was supposed to have lasted, it took fourteen hours. King lost large amounts of blood.When it was over, he had severe pain in his legs. On the third day after the surgery, on his way to the bathroom, King dropped dead of a blood clot. Another patient, Jennifer Springs, was a fast-food cashier who had injured her back in a fall in 1995. Scheffey had operated on her back eight times between 1996 and 2001, telling her that if she did not have the operations, she would eventually be unable to walk. She got worse and worse, at one point staying in the hospital for three months. She now has severe leg and back pain, far more intense than when she started out. She can walk only short distances. Patient Mary Garcia lost a large amount of blood in a 2002 operation on her back. Now she too has severe pain in her legs and back, can't sleep because of the pain, and can walk only short distances.
She will never be able to work again. She sued Scheffey last year. "I try not to take too much pain medication," she says. "I prefer to cry."
With such a constant flow of patient complaints, Scheffey ought to have attracted (yet again) the attention of the state board. But the lesson of 1995 was that even if the board mounted a large and competent case, it was still impossible to get rid of Scheffey for reasons of malpractice. In 2002 Dallas Morning News reporter Doug J. Swanson published a sweeping indictment of the medical board as an incompetent, do-nothing agency. "It has refused," wrote Swanson, "in the last five years to revoke the license of a single doctor for committing medical errors." Nothing was different at the workers' comp commission either:The agency still resolutely refused to throw out bad doctors.
Things finally began to change at the state board under president Lee Anderson and new executive director Donald Patrick. In 2002 the number of informal "settlement conferences"-where doctors come before the board to defend themselves against complaints-rose from 172 to 477, the number of disciplinary actions jumped from 187 to 277, and the financial penalties more than doubled. Budgets increased. Government funds flowed. Bad doctors had their licenses taken away for standard-of-care violations. "We, the agency and the board, began to see our mission differently," says Patrick."There is a lot of fearlessness, because we've got nothing to lose.We said,'Let's do as good a job as we can to try to protect the people of Texas,' because we were aware that we had not been doing that."The same thing was happening, at a much slower pace, at the TWCC, where medical adviser Bill Nemeth had instituted an "approved doctor" list, prompting howls of protest from the Texas Medical Association, the doctors' trade association.
Taking out Scheffey was one of the reformers' top priorities. In 2003, after the death of Cecil Viands, Scheffey's license was temporarily suspended by the state medical board. The following year, the board brought a second case against him that was based on twenty-nine surgeries on eleven patients and the testimony of six surgeons. On the recommendation of that court, Scheffey's license to practice was revoked in February 2005. He has appealed it, though it seems unlikely that he will win reinstatement.
Though Scheffey would not comment for this story, his longtime lawyer, Ace Pickens, said he felt that there was no basis for either the revocation of Scheffey's license or for the $845,000 fine. "If you look at the Board of Medical Examiners' records for administrative penalties over the last five years," Pickens says,"[and] you add them all up, it would not amount to this one case." He also pointed out that almost all of Scheffey's surgeries had been supported by second opinions: "They took eleven patients, ten of whom had been subject to second opinions, and said that second opinions by board-certified orthopedic surgeons were no good and that the surgery should not have been performed. Even if that is so, at least he went through the system and should be given the benefit of the doubt. He did not go about maliciously performing surgery. He got a second opinion for everything he did." Pickens, who has known Scheffey for more than twenty years and says the two are friends, also vouches for Scheffey's character. "Dr. Scheffey has absolutely been a lightning rod because he is an advocate for patients," says Pickens. "He is a good man. I don't believe he is an ogre or that he is evil."
Scheffey now appears to be completely out of business.Two months after his license was revoked, a corporation he owned called Harris County Bone and Joint Clinic Association pled guilty to a third-degree-felony charge of "securing execution of a document by deception"-fraudulent billing-and paid penalties of $25,599. He sold his mansion in Shadyside and moved back into the smaller mansion in River Oaks, where he still officially resides and where he was served with litigation papers as recently as April. According to Harris County records, he still faces roughly twenty malpractice suits, all filed since 2000. Though he was recently investigated by the FBI for workers' comp fraud, the agency says that that investigation is now complete. It produced no indictments. In its 2004 complaint, the state medical board also charged Scheffey with practicing medicine with a suspended license, a third-degree felony punishable by up to ten years in prison. According to the complaint, Scheffey had continued to practice medicine even after his 2003 suspension, using his partner Dr. Floyd Hardimon as a front.When the board temporarily suspended Hardimon's license later in 2003, it did so in part because it found that Hardimon "associated with and aided and abetted [Scheffey] in the practice of medicine after [Scheffey's] medical license had been suspended."