AseraCare Hospice accused of Medicare fraud
Bernice Yeung, California Watch
A national for-profit hospice care company that is partially owned by a San Francisco private equity firm has allegedly bilked Medicare of millions of dollars, according to a legal complaint filed this week by the U.S. Department of Justice.
In court documents, the U.S. government alleges that since at least 2007, AseraCare Hospice of Texas has fraudulently certified patients as terminally ill to illegally collect Medicare payments.
"AseraCare, through its reckless business practices, admitted and retained individuals who were not eligible to receive Medicare hospice benefits, because it was financially lucrative - and did so even after AseraCare's auditor alerted AseraCare to troubling problems," court documents state.
Hospice care provides palliative care - ranging from pain relief to psychological and spiritual services - to patients who have less than six months to live. About $13 billion in Medicare funding is spent on hospice care each year, and the industry annually serves 1.54 million Americans and more than 91,000 Californians.
Read more:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2012/01/05/MN4C1MLICT.DTL#ixzz1igWaAatx
= new reply since forum marked as read
