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Report: Medicare spending billions on suspicious claims
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| Contributor | kal |
| Last Edited | kal Sep 24, 2008 04:17am |
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| Category | General |
| Media | Newspaper - USA Today |
| News Date | Wednesday, September 24, 2008 10:00:00 AM UTC0:0 |
| Description | Medicare pays millions each year for medical supplies such as walkers and glucose test strips for patients who don't appear to need them, congressional investigators say in a report out today.
Investigators reviewed bills submitted by medical suppliers from January 2001 to December 2006 for 18 different items and found questionable claims totaling more than $1 billion.
Those included walkers for patients identified by special "diagnosis codes" as having sinus congestion, paraplegia or shoulder injuries. There also were hundreds of thousands of claims for diabetes-related glucose test strips for patients whose diagnosis codes listed them as having breathing problems, bubonic plague, leprosy or impotence.
Investigators from the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations also looked at medical equipment claims submitted from 1995 to 2006. They found $4.8 billion in Medicare payments for bills submitted with diagnosis codes that were invalid or blank. Some used smiley faces or exclamation points instead of the proper coding, but the bills were still paid.
"Since when did doctors start prescribing blood-glucose test strips for the bubonic plague? It seems like a no-brainer that Medicare should check the diagnosis before paying for expensive medical equipment," says Sen. Norm Coleman of Minnesota, the subcommittee's top Republican.
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