"An Illinois man was sentenced Friday to more than three years in federal prison for shipping unwanted penis enlargers to diabetes patients in a scheme to bilk Medicare out of more than $2.2 million."
It turns out he would just mail the devices to people and then bill Medicare for $284. And they paid.
George W. Bush apparently thought Medicare fraud was jes' fine, but the Obama administration has been cracking down. As you may recall, they made a $295 million bust in September. What is astonishing about this is a) how easy it was and b) that most of the perpetrators are physicians. When my own father was in a nursing home, with dementia, all sorts of services kept showing up on his statement that he definitely hadn't received and did not need. My mother tried complaining to the administration, but they didn't do anything -- quite possibly because they were getting a cut. We can hope that Eric Holder will continue to make progress on this front. Medicare is in enough financial trouble without all this blatant theft.
Discussion of public health and health care policy, from a public health perspective. The U.S. spends more on medical services than any other country, but we get less for it. Major reasons include lack of universal access, unequal treatment, and underinvestment in public health and social welfare. We will critically examine the economics, politics and sociology of health and illness in the U.S. and the world.
I think that offering Medicare recipients a percentage of fraud recovery that they identify is a good idea.
ReplyDeleteI've heard of other device scams. Giving seniors a cut in fraud recovery would put more skin in the game.