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.

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,”
"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.

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