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The government is putting millions of
Medicare dollars at risk by authorizing fake companies that sell wheelchairs,
prosthetics and other medical supplies to submit reimbursement claims, congressional
investigators said, according to the Associated Press.
The fictional companies, from Maryland and Virginia,
were approved by Medicare to supply medical equipment despite their having no
customers and no products in stock after the Government Accountability Office
provided false documents and confused information that offered little assurances
the companies were legitimate, according to a report by the Government
Accountability Office. A GAO investigator even left a “vague message” on the
answering machine of the contractor responsible for the investigating the
applications, pretending to be a supplier. Roughly $1 billion of the $10
billion in annual Medicare payments the government makes for medical equipment
were deemed improper.
“If real fraudsters had been in charge of
the fictitious companies, they would have been clear to bill Medicare from the Virginia office for
potentially millions of dollars of false supplies,” the GAO said in the report.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid
Services acknowledged that there were problems with its enrollment procedures.
The agency said it recently put in place new standards that require medical
suppliers to be certified. According to the AP, among other changes are:
requiring that suppliers keep supporting paper work from doctors, limiting use
cell phones and pagers as a supplier’s primary business number, setting up a
new competitive bidding process for medical equipment. The program will be
fully rolled out by September 2009.
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