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By Root 775 0

On the Thursday before Memorial Day weekend in 1985, Scheffey operated on the forty-three-year-old Daisetta housewife to remove several disks in her back and fuse several vertebrae. He was in the midst of that surgery when he lost control of her bleeding. Some four hours into the operation, Tywater was dead. There was blood everywhere in the operating room. The anesthesiologist’s report is nearly illegible because it is smeared with Tywater’s blood. Scheffey was thirty-five at the time, and this was the first fatality to take place in his operating room. But what should have been the unique horror of watching a patient bleed to death had seemingly little effect on him. He spent the holiday with his girlfriend and another couple at his large house in Baytown on Cedar Bayou. They rode golf carts around the property and drove golf balls into the water, went waterskiing, and swam in his pool.

Scheffey was used to the good life, and his career can be understood as an ongoing, if highly unconventional, attempt to maintain it. He was born in Dallas in 1949 and grew up in an affluent family with a brother and two sisters. His father was a decorated World War II pilot and a successful lawyer who once ran for mayor of Dallas. The family was wealthy enough to buy Eric a Jaguar XKE for his sixteenth birthday. He attended W.T. White High School and then the University of Texas, graduating in 1972. He began his medical training at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston before transferring to the University of Texas Medical School at San Antonio and finishing in 1976. The year before, he had married Liza Goodson, a former Highland Park High School cheerleader from a well-to-do Dallas family. The marriage ended in divorce in 1979, for undisclosed reasons. He completed an internship and a four-year residency in orthopedic surgery at the Medical University of South Carolina. In 1981 he moved to Baytown, just east of Houston, home to the blue-collar industries that line the booming Houston Ship Channel.

Baytown, and east Harris County in general, is an orthopedic surgeon’s paradise. People who do manual work for a living are frequently injured, and their most serious injuries usually involve backs, knees, shoulders, elbows, and hands—the domain of orthopedics. Most of these people also carry generous amounts of state-regulated workers’ compensation insurance, which involves a sort of bargain between the laborer and the employer: A worker gives up the right to sue if he is injured in exchange for long-term medical care and disability benefits, including partial replacement of lost wages. Each year workers’ comp in Texas covers roughly 200,000 injuries, for which 240 insurers pay out some $2 billion in benefits. The workers themselves pay nothing, and there is no limit to how much medical care they can receive. Most of these patients have real injuries. But a small percentage engage in what is known euphemistically as symptom magnification (i.e., faking it or exaggerating pain) to take advantage of the system. It is a bitter irony that many of them ended up in the offices of Eric Scheffey, who would one day become the largest single biller in the program. In later testimony, Scheffey recalled that in Baytown his practice “took off like a rocket and continued along that vein…. A lot of work-men’s compensation patients predominated my practice and continued to do so, at least ninety percent.” Under workers’ comp rules, Scheffey was required to get a second opinion for every surgery. He always managed to find one.

He established his surgical practice at three Baytown hospitals: Humana Hospital Baytown, Gulf Coast Hospital, and San Jacinto Methodist Hospital. He was immediately popular. A strikingly handsome man, with olive skin, brown eyes, and a thick shock of dark, wavy hair swept back from a widow’s peak, Scheffey had a soft voice, a Texas accent, and a warm, engaging manner. His patients and colleagues found him friendly, charismatic, and very persuasive, particularly when talking a patient into an expensive surgery. In the