Granted,
this story by The Miami Herald focuses on Medicare fraud in South Florida, but it is a template for what could be happening nationwide.
The piece said, "A six-month
Miami Herald investigation has found that the corruption has spun out of control during the past decade with little effort by Medicare regulators to stop it here and in other major cities."
Just read this passage as an appetizer:
Consider this statistic: In 2005, South Florida clinics -- mostly concentrated in Miami-Dade -- submitted $2.2 billion in HIV-drug-infusion bills to Medicare, according to the inspector general. That was 22 times more than the total HIV-infusion claims submitted to Medicare by healthcare clinics in the rest of the country combined. The trend continues to this day.
In addition, false claims for medical supplies such as motorized wheelchairs, glucose monitors and oxygen equipment run into the hundreds of millions of dollars annually in South Florida.
These two areas of healthcare corruption, which have become targets of heightened federal prosecutions, account for at least $2.5 billion in Medicare fraud annually in South Florida, according to authorities. But that figure is conservative because it excludes other areas of potential Medicare fraud -- hospitals, home healthcare assistance and prescription drugs.
Still, the medical equipment and HIV-infusion schemes alone add up to at least $7 million in Medicare fraud daily in South Florida, where a sprawling cast of illegal HIV-therapy clinics, bogus suppliers, inner-city patient recruiters, complicit doctors and devious billing companies have even used the names of dead doctors to bilk the U.S. government out of billions of Medicare dollars.
As you go through the story you will read about how easy it is to set up a fake medical-equipment supply business, how Medicare issues checks to dead doctors and how Congress has ignored the problems in the system.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/12/AR2008061203915.html
