In the 60 Minutes report below, the heart surgeries were scheduled, and in many cases performed on healthy individuals with NO heart problems. This abuse came to the surface through patients seeking other opinions, but unfortunately not before 167 people died and hundreds more received unnecessary surgery.

It is much more realistic for that to happen in colon surgeries, the abuse is much more tricFL to recognize and/or expose. With colon diseases, there is usually a way to "rationalize" the surgery because there is almost always some inflammations, tissue irregularity or other damage which the doctor can identify.

The problem is that there is not any system of accountability in place today.

We are taught to trust "the physician" or get a second opinion, and in almost all cases the second and/or third opinion can be as pro-surgery as the first.

It is a lack of knowledge about other alternatives for treatment and a fear of lawsuits.

To state the evident, doctors are progressively more finding ways to validate surgery in an effort to accommodate the lack of compensation from the insurance companies for little things as office visits.

Doctor's are too often interested in bottom line business to explore other options for their patients. It is a fact which the patients in most instances cannot bear to comprehend.

(CBS) Rep. Pete Stark (D-Calif.) tells Ed Bradley that executives at the nation's second largest healthcare company are "poster children for unethical business practices" in this 60 Minutes report on one of the company's California hospitals accused of performing unnecessary heart surgeries. Bradley's report on Tenet Health Systems' Redding Medical Center was broadcast on Sunday, Feb. 16, 2003 at 7 p.m., ET.

Tenet hospitals have been the subjects of federal proceedings in Florida for patient endangerment and in California for substantiation of illegal kickbacks to doctors; the federal government is suing Tenet for defrauding taxpayers. The FBI is now investigating Tenet's Redding Medical Center, and two of the hospital's doctors for purportedly recommending and performing avoidable heart surgeries. Tenet says they first learned of the complaints in October 2002, when the FBI raided the hospital and confiscated thousands of files, including those of 167 patients who died after heart surgery.

Stark believes Tenet was aware of complaints about the doctors before that day, as well as Dr. Chae Hyun Moon, who ordered the alleged surgeries to be unwarranted, complaints which were made for numerous years earlier to the FBI raid.

"When [Tenet] has documented charges by people who have called [Moon's] practice to their attention time and time again, when their own nurses...other physicians were complaining," Stark tells Bradley, "It's pretty hard for somebody to say, 'Gee, we didn't know what was going on.'" Adds Stark, "These guys are the poster children for unethical business practices."

Neither Tenet nor Moon agreed to participate in an interview with 60 Minutes. In Sunday's report, Bradley interviews three of Dr. Moon's patients whose recommendations for heart bypass surgery were reversed by other doctors. One of the patients, Dr. John Corapi, called the FBI after numerous cardiac specialists told him the bypass Dr. Moon ordered for him was unsubstantiated and Tenet administrators at Redding Medical told him they wouldn't investigate the claims. "I said...Investigate it. There's something that's not quite right and they refused," Corapi tells Bradley. "And it just sticks in my memory, Hal Chilton, the CEO, said over the phone...'We like our position. Seek counsel if you like,'" Corapi says the CEO told him.