SUMMARY & CRITIQUE OF:
“Cheating in a Bottom Line Economy” (by David Callahan) In “Cheating in a Bottom Line Economy,” author David Callahan explains the fundamental reasons for the decay of simple business ethics in today’s economy in order to meet bottom line standards. Callahan draws conclusions from everyday businesses such as auto mechanic services, law offices, and even professional medical firms to prove that people will almost always choose financial stability over integrity. The economic life in America has transformed itself into a vast land of professionals focused on achieving “lean and mean” businesses in efforts to achieve the “American Dream,” but in essence lose sense of their morals. What happens when an employee is
in Callahan 39). Commitments to meeting bottom line standards and greed have become directions of undermining integrity of even the most trusted profession: medical doctors. Medical professionals begin engaging in multilevel marketing companies such as the Wellness International Network (WIN), which dictate distributors to sell their company’s product at any extent. By earning money off of new distributors, this multilevel marketing became a pyramid scheme for destruction. “Report peg the sale of health supplements by doctors at nearly $200 million in 2001, a tenfold increase from 1997. An estimated 20,000 doctors are now selling supplements from their offices, more than double the number of five years ago” (Callahan 49). These sorts of insider trading within their offices go against the American Medical Association guidelines that “doctors must ensure that the claims supporting any products they sell to patients are ‘scientifically valid and backed up by peer reviewed literature and other unbiased scientific sources’” (Callahan 49). They clearly prohibit the exchange of medical equipment, but the profit is too grand for the doctors