Hoping to find evidence of “massive, massive fraud,” the stateDepartment of Insurance in June dispatched more than a dozen armedpolice officers to search a Fort Lauderdale insurance office.They left without a single sheet of paper.
Instead, the investigators confronted a force perhaps more powerfulthan police and prosecutors: the Florida and U.S. constitutions.As insurance regulators try to clamp down on fraud in the viaticalsindustry � insurance companies that buy and sell the life insurancepolicies of terminally ill patients � the state’s strict safeguardingof medical records is causing problems for investigators.
