sion was not one I could make on my own. If we were to go down this
path, it would be a major change in strategy for the spine business
unit with significant risks. The decisionmakers had no such misgiv-
ings. They thought it was a fantastic idea with huge potential and their
thoughts soon turned to how big a stocking order we could get them
to place.
I didn't know it at the time, but this was the key turning point. Had
higher-ups decided to pass on this opportunity, I firmly believe I would-
n't be writing this article from prison. I didn't fight the decision,
though. I once again played the good soldier who wanted to please his
bosses and agreed to begin negotiations. I was about to embark on 3
years of constant stress where I was the center of a storm in which I
felt trapped. I was getting on a roller coaster where once you were
strapped in, the ride never ended until it went off the rails at 100 mph.
The personal injury model
And so began the negotiations between what would become DiscoCare
and ArthroCare in the 4
th
quarter of 2005. Although the negotiations
were with the attorney and the practice administrator from the original
meeting, a physician who was one of the owners of Palm Beach Lakes
Surgery Center owned 100% of DiscoCare. In the government's indict-
ments of former ArthroCare employees, this would be the beginning of
the fraud that they would be prosecuting.
DiscoCare had visions of grandeur and wanted to be the country's
exclusive SpineWand distributor. Although the U.S. spine business wasn't
huge (less than $15 million per year at that time), we weren't about to put
the entire business in the hands of people we hardly knew and trust an
untested business model. We all agreed that the personal injury model
was an interim solution to the ultimate goal of gaining universal private
insurance coverage for the procedure.
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B r e a k i n g B a d
