I think this is a fair point, that the headline suggests a systemic problem, but its narrative is highly focused on one bad player, albeit someone who took adva

I think this is a fair point, that the headline suggests a systemic problem, but its narrative is highly focused on one bad player, albeit someone who took advantage of highly exploitable weaknesses. Full disclosure: I used to work at PP years ago and my time overlapped with the author's, so I'm obviously biased. One takeaway I got was that the system is easy to game – particularly in applying to CMS for a NPI number. And apparently, insurers just assume or don't care that CMS does minimal vetting to stop fraudsters. And currently, it seems insurers are optimized to eat the costs (and ostensibly, pass it on to customers) than to actively root it out, which has its pros and cons ("cons" including being overaggressive and making it harder for regular people to get treatments approved. While the system overall seems ripe for abuse – the story says CMS officials can't recall any instance in which someone has been sanctioned for applying w/ fraudulent credentials, and it's hard to believe that Williams is the first to discover the vulnerabilities – the story ultimately doesn't know the total costs of this kind of fraud.