A 10-Year Old’s View of Health Care Enforcement

My Daughter’s Depiction of Health Care Enforcement — I Call it Enforcica  —

One of the more challenging and rewarding aspects of being a health care attorney is taking a complex regulated environment and breaking it down in a way that is understandable, regardless of the audience.  In the compliance world, this means communicating the rules and how to follow them, the players and their influences and motivations. 

Over the weekend, while on a long car ride, my abilities to meet this challenge were put to the test by perhaps my toughest grader: my ten-year-old daughter. 

When she asked me what was keeping me so busy at work, I gave her my regular elevator speech:

I help people who provide health care to follow the rules and I defend them when somebody says they didn’t.

Being the precocious observer that she is (and because she has heard that a few times before), she found that answer to be completely unsatisfactory.  Pushing further, she asked: “Why is it so hard to follow the rules?”  After all, she doesn’t have any problem doing so, whether at home or school.  (Fortunately, this happens to be true.) 

I then explained what’s going on right now with Medicare and Medicaid enforcement.  Loving to sketch as she does, she took my words and put them into pictures.  When we arrived at our destination, she handed me this:

Enforcica

We recently took a family trip to Spain, where we saw some wonderful art, including that of Picasso.  In discussing his famous work Guernica, Picasso said:

. . . this bull is a bull and this horse is a horse… If you give a meaning to certain things in my paintings it may be very true, but it is not my idea to give this meaning. What ideas and conclusions you have got I obtained too, but instinctively, unconsciously. I make the painting for the painting. I paint the objects for what they are.

So, what do you see?  I’d be interested in your interpretive comments.  For now, I’m calling the piece Enforcica.