Government Health Care Promotes Fraud
On Wednesday, August 5, 2009, I got a phone call from a very upset senior citizen who is a client of our insurance agency. He wanted to know how to report medicare fraud by a local medical service provider. The client is from Munster, Indiana.
The client’s wife dropped something on her foot. He took her to a local medical service provider. An x-ray of the wife’s foot revealed that nothing was broken.
A few days later, the client and his wife got a bill from the medical service provider which included a charge for a chest x-ray. The client and his wife contacted the medical service provider to ask about the charge for the chest x-ray.
The medical service provider’s representative insisted that a chest x-ray was ordered and done and that the couple owed for it. The couple asked which doctor ordered the chest x-ray. They got no response. The couple refused to pay for the chest x-ray. The medical service provider’s representative threatened to sue the couple to force payment for the chest x-ray.
A few weeks later, the couple got a Medicare Summary Notice which showed that the medical service provider had submitted the chest x-ray charge to Medicare and that Medicare had paid for the false charge.
Because I write a column about Medicare and VA clinic billing problems, I get tips from around the country. One tip came from a computer expert in California who worked for a company that did billing services for medical service providers who bill California’s medical system.
He noticed a pattern of questionable or clearly fraudulent charges. He developed a program to spot such charges. In one seven month period that he tested, he found over TWO MILLION DOLLARS of questionable or fraudulent charges. Probably, there are a few thousand billing services in California like the one where the computer expert works. If California is paying about FOUR MILLION DOLLARS per year times 3,000 such billing services, then California taxpayers are paying twelve billion dollars per year in fraudulent medical claims.
Aren’t government run health care programs wonderful and sensible? (Of course, this is a sarcastic comment!)
Woodrow Wilcox is the senior medical bill problem solver at Senior Care Insurance Services in Merrillville, Indiana. That is the largest senior citizen oriented insurance agency in the Midwest. For over six years, Woodrow Wilcox has helped senior citizens with medical bill problems with Medicare and VA clinics. He has saved senior citizens over $600,000 in wrongful charges. For more health care articles by Wilcox, visit www.medicareproblems.net or www.woodrowwilcox.com.
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