Special Report: Phantom firms bleed millions from Medicare

Special Report: Phantom firms bleed millions from Medicare

www.reuters.com

By the time authorities busted a fake AIDS clinic in Miami, it had bilked Medicare of more than $4.5 million...

Michel De Jesus Huarte, a 40-year-old Cuban-American, hadn't simply avoided arrest. He had hatched a plan to steal millions more from Medicare by forming at least 29 other shell companies - paper-only firms with no real operations.

Hundreds of others have used the veil of corporate secrecy to help steal hundreds of millions of dollars...

(visit the link for the full news article)

This is a very detailed investigation into what is going on, and well worth a read if the Medicare system means anything to you. The size of the frauds is mind-boggling:

"These companies are nameless, faceless entities collecting billions in secret," says Patrick Burns, director of communications for the advocacy group Taxpayers Against Fraud in Washington, D.C. Medicare is "chasing it," he says. "But they're not getting any closer."

So how does it make you feel to know this is where so many of your tax dollars end up?


www.reuters.com
(visit the link for the full news article)

Link to video 1

Link to video 2

reply to post by pause4thought


Stupid government agencies..

Sigh..

Solution is simple: Before a practice can begin collecting ANY Government funded programs like Medicaid or Medicare, they should first put forth an application to state they wish to offer services under these programs.

Then a representative from the Government should go to the practice, investigate the facilities and do in-depth background checks on the supposed doctor to make sure he really is a practicing doctor.

If there are facilities, there is a doctor, and the practice has patients .. allow them to bill under those programs.

This alone would cut down on a huge portion of the cheating.. there would have to be an audit system in place to cut down on cheating at existing firms.

The premise of capitalism used to be hard work, but the people who write the legislation leave plenty of loopholes for the elite criminals, who afterall bribe the government to do as they please. If anything thinks the government exists for the betterment of society they are seriously delluding themselves through ignorance.

Big business has infiltrated government a long, long time ago and they are the ones pushing for the spread of global capitalism and all the negatives that come along with it. Cheap labor does not increase the standard of living. It degrades it!

As for offshore companies, what do you think the pink sheets are and all those penny stocks? Some are legit that are reorganising their business model/structure, but many are actually shell companies that have no stated goals or are lying about their stated goals, and use that haven primarily for laundering unethical/illegal funds from all over the world.

The world is a vampire, but people are ignorant and thus nothing changes! BTW several hundred millions is pocket change compared to what the cia and kgb are suspected of dealing. Try billions or trillions!!!

What a joke. That's how Rick Scott got into office. On money stolen from Medicare. You think he's gonna cut off those stolen dollars now?

My Mother was in bad health the last several years of her life. She had an oxygen concentrator that was leased from a medical company and paid for by Medicare. She passed away in August of 2010. I called the medical company and asked them to pick up the concentrator and they said that they would contact me with a time for pickup. I have called them twice a month since then and they still haven't come to pick it up. Finally I called our State Department of Public Welfare and reported it to them. The medical company called me and told me that I could dispose of the concentrator they didn't want it back. The state then contacted me and told me that my Mother's estate owed them $2600 that they had paid the medical company after my Mother's passing. She had no estate. As a matter of fact, I am still tying to get AARP to make good on the $15,000 life insurance policy that she had. A judge stated that I had to pay the $2600 or it would be garnished from my wages. I'm waiting for the Federal Government to contact me to tell me what I owe them.

Having been forced by circumstance into the medicaid system I am appalled at the way Dr's ,hospitals and "other" healthcare agencies milk my benefits.I am disabled but do not want the "great show" that is most medicine today. for instance. I had a echo of my heart(I have CHF due to chemically induced arteritis from pesticide exposure) that was misread. this resulted in an expensive ambulance ride 100miles to the heart center and a week in the cardiac unit being pumped full of rat poison for a blood clot which never existed. I am also diabetic and during a five day stay I was fed 3 pb crackers and one plate of scrambled eggs,given no insulin and my sugars checked only a few times.Maybe medicare does not pay for food? At any rate they pumped the whole thing up to cover the original mistake reading the echo by "treating the hell out of me" to the tune of 40,000$. Am I glad to have medical coverage? not at the cost being milked in my name. It disgusts me to no end to see the people trusted to give appropriate treatment milk the system using my name and my benefits for amounts of money I could live out my life in comfort on.Since entering this system I have had necessary help and I have seen things mandated that were simply ways to pump the system .Weekly wound care for a surgical site when I cared for the open infection for six years prior and am alive to tell about it. 500 a week for 12 weeks to have a nurse look at my ankle. Not to mention the wound vacuum at 1200 a week I had to teach the nurses how to use the special dressing for ( had a new one each week till I had taught the whole lot of them).
Any way the system is being milked hardest by those who bill it not those who use it IME anyway

I wonder?

Does Obamacare address these problems?

Or will they continue to allow it.

We keep hearing about scams as they continue.

reply to post by pause4thought


Thank goodness the government started tracking and investigating! ...Even if they did wait til 2007 to start paying attention.

...not until 2007 did the federal government form task forces to exclusively target Medicare fraud rings.

Even the big hospitals scam Medicare.

My mom broke her leg, has surgery. One night stay in the hospital.

Surgery and doctor cost: $6,000.

One over night stay (nothing special, just a bed to sleep for observation) $15,000.

I'm shocked to hear that people are at least as worried about the medical profession scamming the system as the professional fraudsters! Some of the personal accounts are truly disturbing as well.

So where does it go from here? Scrap the system and start from scratch?

Adopt the Norwegian model of health care. I hear it works very well. People in America have been trained to exhibit fear at the word socialised "X", no matter what the "X" is. I like having a socialized fire department. Stops people from going up to my house and saying, "Hey, that's a nice house there. It'd be a real shame if anything happened to it, so pay up." Then you don't pay up, and a bunch of men in masks come up with gas cans and lighter fluid and set your place ablaze. You know, I had a fire at my old house earlier this year. I was quite glad for a socialized fire department. They didn't ask for my insurance card before they started putting the fire out. They didn't charge me anything. I had already lost quite a bit because my house was on fire. Now, imagine it's not just your replaceable possessions, but your very health it's self that these inhuman monsters are using as leverage to make profit on.
This all dates back to Nixon, colluding with the HMOs. They wanted to turn the hospitals into money makers, and they succeeded, at the expense of the common man. Nixon was so goddamn crooked they had to bury him using a corkscrew.

I think manditory 10 or 20 years in jail would make these criminals think twice before doing such a thing.

You'd think that, but you'd be wrong. It's the golden rule. Those with the gold make the rules, and they have every reason in the world to keep the laws the way they are, to keep the dollars flowing into their pockets. In the state I live it, it's not conspiracy theory, it's conspiracy fact. Rick Scott is a crooked bastard with absolutely no morals and a heart made out of the blackest rotten matter you've seen in your life.
Crime #1: Acting as CEO of the Hospital Corporation of America, the HCA, his company commits atleast 14 felonies, and is charged 600 million dollars in fines by the U.S. Government. Scott resigns, but not without taking 350 million dollars in stock with him.
Crime #2: Mandatory drug testing of people on welfare, 98% of whom tested clean. This wasn't about ensuring a drug-free populace. No, this was about earning him some more money. You see, a company called Solantic did the testing, charging each of the welfare folks 35 dollars for the "luxury" of taking the drug test. In exchange for this, Solantic gave Rick Scott's wife multiple million dollars worth of stock in their company. Would have been suspicious, I guess, if they just gave the money to Scott himself. Rotten bastard of a governor. Corrupt to the core.

reply to post by pause4thought


that is what happens when you let your "friend" have a job he isn't qualified for.....then he gets an unqualified friend a job and so on until we have a bunch of people in positions of power looking out for eachother instead of us the people and on top of that, they are some of the dumbest people on the planet.


They are so dumb they don't even know they are dumb....that is how dumb they are....

And a ton of these people make our laws and oversee important businesses and government agencies.


I feel like i'm one of maybe 1,000 people in the Us who understands this........

It's like if you try to be anything but dumb or ignorant, then somehow you are an outcast...

How do you set up to receive medicare payments?
aids clinics you say

Originally posted by JIMC5499
My Mother was in bad health the last several years of her life. She had an oxygen concentrator that was leased from a medical company and paid for by Medicare. She passed away in August of 2010. I called the medical company and asked them to pick up the concentrator and they said that they would contact me with a time for pickup. I have called them twice a month since then and they still haven't come to pick it up. Finally I called our State Department of Public Welfare and reported it to them. The medical company called me and told me that I could dispose of the concentrator they didn't want it back. The state then contacted me and told me that my Mother's estate owed them $2600 that they had paid the medical company after my Mother's passing. She had no estate. As a matter of fact, I am still tying to get AARP to make good on the $15,000 life insurance policy that she had. A judge stated that I had to pay the $2600 or it would be garnished from my wages. I'm waiting for the Federal Government to contact me to tell me what I owe them.

edit on 21-12-2011 by JIMC5499 because: typos

Don't pay any money owed after the first time you called the medical company. That phone call legally stopped the lease. The fact they never picked up the machine and kept billing you is fraud.
Its fraud by them to bill after that point. But its common for companies to try.
Get a copy of your phone records to show the time and date of that call.
The judge was wrong unless you did not tell the judge about when you called the medical company.
If they garnish your wages turn around and file a small claims court suit and go in with your phone record of the call time and date and ask that your money be refunded from the end of the contract. (the contract ended with the phone call)

Don't let this type fraud.continue

Also get appointed executor of her estate and file bankruptsy of the estate.

If done right you are then not libial for anything you did not cosign for.

With he AARP life insurance call the state department of insurance
www.insurance.pa.gov...
www.portal.state.pa.us...

And here i thought that the over 65 million Americans on Social Security who were paying for their medicare from their Social Security checks funny how to few people ever looked at one government check paying for their own health insurance and of course if that was in the private sector they would be screaming bloody murder and fraud.

Medicare is paid from SS and people getting older doesn't help.

Anyone that reads Obama care will find it leaves it open to the same fraud times 10.

The largest medical care system in the US does not have this type fraud.
So the government knows how to stop it but does not.

(by the way that largest medical care system in the US that does not have this type fraud is the VA health care system)

There are NGO's that get government contracts to track down fraud waste and abuse of the healthcare system (in all facets). They find it ALL the time, so this should not be a suprise at all........