Monday, December 31, 2012
You make your profits where you can
And it that means you provide shitty care, unnecessary treatment and Medicare fraud, so be it. A recent study into Medicare fraud discovered that For-Profit nursing homes were guilty of this approximately 3 times as often as Not-For-Profits.
A report by federal health care inspectors in November said the U.S. nursing home industry overbills Medicare $1.5 billion a year for treatments patients don’t need or never receive."Pushing the legal envelope"? Hell, those For-Profits have trampled the legal envelope like a herd of hungry cattle into fresh pasture. Until some level of government starts throwing people into jail, we can't expect it to get any better.
Not disclosed was how much worse it is when providers have a profit motive. Thirty per cent of claims sampled from for- profit homes were deemed improper, compared to just 12 percent from non-profits, according to data Bloomberg News obtained from the inspector general’s office of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services via a Freedom of Information Act request.
The figures add to the case -- advanced by health care researchers and Medicare overseers in at least six government and academic studies in the last three years -- that the rise of for-profit providers is fueling waste, fraud and patient harm in the $2.8 trillion U.S health care sector. At nursing homes, 78 percent of $105 billion in revenues went to for-profits in 2010, up from 72 percent in 2002, according to the latest available government breakdowns.
“Research shows for-profits are more likely to pursue money in all kinds of ways than non-profits are, even by pushing the legal envelope,”
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