Causes or Cures How Bad is Healthcare Fraud and Corruption? With Professor Graham Brooks
Healthcare corruption doesn’t just happen in broken systems or far away countries.
It happens in hospitals with shiny floors.
In billion dollar healthcare industries.
In systems filled with rules, audits, and professionals sworn to protect patients.
It happens quietly. And it happens everywhere.
In this episode of Causes or Cures, Dr. Eeks speaks with Professor Graham Brooks, an international expert on healthcare corruption and criminal justice, to expose how fraud and corruption operate across healthcare systems around the world, from low resource settings to some of the most regulated and well funded systems on Earth.
Rather than treating corruption as something that belongs “elsewhere,” this conversation reveals the shared vulnerabilities that allow it to thrive in plain sight.
We explore:
• The hidden ways corruption shows up in both poor and wealthy healthcare systems
• Real world schemes that drained millions while patients paid the price
• How much money vanishes globally each year and why the true cost is likely far higher
• Why rules, oversight, and trained professionals often fail to stop exploitation
• How financial incentives and conflicts of interest quietly shape care and clinical decisions
• Where today’s biggest corruption hotspots exist, from billing to drug pricing to procurement
• Whether AI and data could help uncover fraud or create new risks of surveillance
• What patients and clinicians can do when the system itself feels rigged
This episode pulls back the curtain on a side of healthcare most people never see and shows why corruption isn’t a rare scandal. It’s a systemic threat hiding in plain sight.
About the Guest
Professor Graham Brooks is an international expert on corruption in healthcare and criminal justice. He has advised governments, law enforcement bodies, and international organizations on counter fraud and anti corruption efforts, and has been a keynote speaker at major conferences across Europe.
He has participated in United Kingdom Cabinet Office round table discussions on anti corruption, worked with the Royal United Services Institute on money laundering and online business risks, and currently serves as a member of the Group of Experts for the European Healthcare Fraud and Corruption Network.
Professor Brooks has published extensively with international collaborators and is the author of Healthcare Corruption: Causes, Costs, Consequences and Criminal Justice.
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