When Hurricane Zeta hit the Gulf of Mexico in 2020, the crew of the Deepwater Asgard rode it out while their employers allegedly refused to move the rig to safety. Twenty-three workers sued. That part is straightforward.

What is not straightforward is what happened next.

After the lawsuits were filed, all 23 plaintiffs started seeing the same small group of doctors in Houston and Lake Charles. None of the plaintiffs live in either city. Some flew from New England, drove to Boston, caught a flight to Houston, and then drove to Lake Charles for psychiatric appointments. None of them used their own health insurance. None of them paid a single bill. That is because the bills were never meant to be paid.

According to Transocean’s defense team, the attorneys directing the plaintiffs to these providers had a financial arrangement with them. A funding company called CareCapital “purchased” the medical receivables from the Houston providers. The catch: CareCapital and the providers are owned by the same person. The money never left. There was no market check on what got billed. One procedure billed at $7,350 carried a Medicare rate of $115.58.

This is not an isolated tactic. Medico-Legal Funding companies are now a $67 billion industry, and their business model depends on inflated bills becoming inflated verdicts. The providers get paid. The funders collect. The defendant absorbs a damages number unrelated to what care actually costs — and no money ever changes hands until the verdict or settlement is received.

Experts call them phantom damages. The bills are real documents. The amounts are not real costs—what is paid versus what is owed. Yet jurors are presented with these documents as evidence of real debt weighing down victims and justification for awarding an outsized verdict.

FedEx sued over the same playbook earlier this year. This past November, State Farm settled out of court with a doctor who refused to admit guilt but agreed to pay $314K in restitution. 

This isn’t a new problem, either. In 2009, a federal jury sided with State Farm and ordered $15.4 million in restitution from three doctors operating a “fraud mill that sharply inflated the costs of medical care for car accident victims.” 

Legislators have heard testimony about this system across the country. States are starting to require disclosure of who funds what before cases go to trial. The pressure is building.

The Deepwater Asgard workers may have real injuries. That is not the point. The point is that the numbers presented to a jury bear no resemblance to what any real patient would pay for real care. And that gap does not happen by accident.