Monday, August 18, 2014

You can fool all of the bureaucrats some of the time...

...some of the bureaucrats all of the time, and thus (pace Bret Maverick's Ol' Pappy) the odds are pretty good you can defraud Medicare;
The tool of the crime was the motorized wheelchair.
The wheelchair scam was designed to exploit blind spots in Medicare, which often pays insurance claims without checking them first. Criminals disguised themselves as medical-supply companies. They ginned up bogus bills, saying they’d provided expensive wheelchairs to Medicare patients — who, in reality, didn’t need wheelchairs at all. Then the scammers asked Medicare to pay them back, so they could pocket the huge markup that the government paid on each chair.
A lot of the time, Medicare was fooled. The government paid.
Since 1999, Medicare has spent $8.2 billion to procure power wheelchairs and “scooters” for 2.7 million people. Today, the government cannot even guess at how much of that money was paid out to scammers.
Oh, c'mon. Guess.

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