$5m wheelchair highlights US Medicare fraud

[Judi Lynn]

$5m wheelchair highlights US Medicare fraud
By Tom Brown in Miami
October 23, 2007 10:24am
Article from: Reuters

A MEDICAL equipment supplier billed the US Government so often for a wheelchair it ended up costing $US5 million ($5.6m).

And last year, south Florida accounted for 80 per cent of the drugs billed across the entire US for Medicare beneficiaries with HIV/AIDS, even though the region has only 10 per cent of eligible HIV/AIDS patients.

Fraud against Medicare, the federal health insurer for America's 43 million elderly and disabled, has become so prevalent that it may rival the illegal drug trade as a crime of choice in a state long renowned for cocaine cartels, political shenanigans and swampland real estate scams.

In one case, said Alex Acosta, the US attorney for the Southern District of Florida, a company had billed Medicare for millions of dollars worth of specially formulated asthma medication prepared at what the owner claimed to be his own local pharmacy.

"The person wasn't a pharmacist, he was an air conditioner repairman. When we raided the so-called pharmacy where he mixed all these aerosols it was nothing more than a broom closet where all we found was a can of tar," Mr Acosta said.

More:
http://www.news.com.au/story/0,10117,22635740-401,00.html?from=public_rss

[Kiouni]

1. Was it a hover-round?

I hear those are pricey.