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Yahoo NewsWASHINGTON - Sellers of wheelchairs, drugs and other medical supplies collected as much as $93 million in fraudulent Medicare claims based on prescriptions from doctors who actually were dead, some for 10 years or more, a congressional investigation has found.
Millions more dollars will continue to be at risk of waste and fraud each year in the billion-dollar government-run health program for the elderly and disabled unless Medicare officials address flaws that they've promised to fix since at least 2001, according to the probe.
The bipartisan report by the Senate Homeland Security investigations subcommittee, obtained Tuesday by The Associated Press, reviewed millions of reimbursement claims for medical equipment and supplies from 2000 through 2007. It found that Medicare paid out between $60.3 million to $92.8 million to medical suppliers even though they involved claims in which the prescribing doctor listed had been dead for at least 12 months.
In Florida, which has a high number of Medicare claims, more than $2 million alone was paid to medical suppliers from 2002 to 2007 for equipment such as oxygen machines, prosthetics and diabetic equipment that claimed to have prescriptions from 114 deceased doctors. As many as 484 claims totaling $544,789 were filed under an ID code for a single deceased doctor who had died in 1999.
In all, about 7 percent of all deceased doctors and 27 percent of dead doctors in Florida still had active Medicare ID codes that could be used improperly to seek reimbursement.
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http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080708/ap_on_go_co/medicare_dead_doctors
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