HARASIM

a longtime acquaintance.

“He doesn’t like golf,” the retired engineer told me in 2008. “He thinks it’s a waste of time. I’ve never seen him play it or watch it. Basically, all he’s interested in is making money. He just lives on a golf course for the status. “He’s not that hard to figure out.” To this day, according to former Desai patient Patty Aspinwall, the engineer’s observation affords the best insight into the physician who would brag to colleagues that he came here with nothing and amassed a $200 million fortune.

Now cured of hepatitis, she says Desai’s obsession with material status makes it easy to understand why biopsy forceps and bite blocks were also reused, lubricating jelly was rationed, and sheets and medical gowns weren’t changed between patients given worthless and dangerous two-minute colonoscopies.

Desai’s sociopathic greed — former Las Vegas physician Charles Cohan tried unsuccessfully in the ’90s to get regulators to take action against him for billing insurance carriers for bogus-yet-dangerous procedures — didn’t just hurt his patients.

Even after the city of Las Vegas shut down Desai’s office in 2008 — the state medical board where Desai once headed the investigative committee refused to do it — the lives of thousands of Southern Nevadans were imperiled.

“They’re afraid of getting what can be life-saving colonoscopies,” Dr. Frank Nemec noted.

That fear hasn’t been entirely muted by Desai’s death because of the fact that 13 doctors who worked for Desai still can practice in Las Vegas.

Nemec has played a key role in a national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention safe injection practices campaign spawned by the Las Vegas outbreak.

But it was too late for Col. Rodolfo Meana, who died in 2012 from hepatitis C acquired five years earlier at Desai’s clinic.

A Filipino war hero wounded by Islamic terrorists, he told me often before his death that he immigrated to America to be safe. Repeatedly he asked a question that should never have to be asked.

“What kind of doctors and nurses would take chances with other people’s lives?”

Paul Harasim’s column runs Sunday and Tuesday in the Nevada section and Monday in the Health section. Contact him at pharasim@reviewjournal.com or 702-387-5273. Follow @paulharasim on Twitter

K.M. Cannon Las Vegas Review-Journal Rodolfo Meana, 73, goes through notes regarding his experience at the Endoscopy Center of Southern Nevada, run by Dr. Dipak Desai, at his Las Vegas apartment in 2008. Meana contracted hepatitis C at the center and died in 2012.