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Miami's Massive Medicare Fraud Costs All Americans

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The Tampa Tribune

Published: August 20, 2008

Miami is a hotbed of fraud, according to a Miami Herald investigative article. Say what? Miami? Fraud? Of course Miami is known as a hotbed of illegal activity and has been for some time. But this is different on some level. The fraud uncovered by the FBI, according to the Herald report, involves billions of Medicare dollars stolen from taxpayers.

Defrauding Medicare is a lucrative racket for a lot of folks who use immigrants' information to tap into an almost endless supply of money. "Patients" are recruited and they do quite well in this scam. They get paid every time they see a doctor. The clinics then bill Medicare for all kinds of things, but especially AIDS treatments that have long-since been discontinued in the United States.

The bad guys obviously need to go to prison for a long time. More importantly, Medicare must spend more finding the fraud and keeping it from happening in the first place. As it stands, Medicare does little to stop this kind of thing, and it's costing about $60 billion a year, according to experts.
Private insurance companies have understood the cost of fraud, and go to extremes to protect against it. Medicare doesn't follow the same standards that private industry uses.

Everyone understands that Medicare is a massive institution. It serves many millions of Americans who depend on it, and its budget is in the hundreds of billions of dollars. Congress appropriated $720 million to combat fraud several years ago, but that's a drop in the bucket compared to the losses.

It's a sad commentary that such an important entity as Medicare can be so blind to fraud. With so many Americans doing without health care, it's sickening to think criminals are walking away with billions of dollars provided for that cause.

These bad guys are hard to catch because they leave the country at the first sign of trouble. The question is, how come more checks are not implemented on the front end, before the money is distributed?

Let's hope reform is on the way and taxpayers quit having to foot the bill for such ineptitude by one of our most important federal agencies.

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