An excellent article from The Washington Post puts those “Get a free scooter!” commercials in a whole new light.
David A. Fahrenthold starts his story with the trial of a woman in Los Angeles accused of Medicare fraud. He goes on to explain how patient recruiters and dishonest doctors helped to defraud the government out of $964 million in 2003 alone for electric wheelchairs. There is a video (keep trying if it doesn’t launch the first time) that details the “four easy steps” to getting Medicare to pay for a wheelchair that a patient doesn’t really need. There are charts showing the reimbursement trends for electric wheelchairs and pictures of the chairs sitting unused in private homes.
The article touches on everything from identity theft by the Russian mafia to the shut down of the The Scooter Store. My favorite part was a wheelchair recipient who said that he had to climb a flight of stairs to see a doctor who would proclaim the patient unable to climb stairs.
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The saddest and most frustrating section is the explanation of how this happened:
The power-wheelchair scam provided a painful and expensive example of why Medicare fraud works so often. The fault lay partly with Congress, which designed this system to be fast and generous. And it lay partly with Medicare bureaucrats — who were slow to recognize the threat and use the powers they had to stop it. As a result, scammers took advantage of a system that was overwhelmed by its own claims and lacked the manpower and money to check most of those claims before it paid.
The scheme first appeared in the mid-1990s in Miami — a city whose mix of elderly people and professional scammers has always made it the DARPA of Medicare fraud, where bad ideas begin.
In the early 2000s, the wheelchair scam spread from Miami to Houston. There, it exploded. In 2001, for example, Medicare had paid for only 3,000 power wheelchairs in the county that includes Houston.
In 2002, it paid for 31,000.
But, while it lasted, the scam illuminated a critical failure point in the federal bureaucracy: Medicare’s weak defenses against fraud. The government knew how the wheelchair scheme worked in 1998. But it wasn’t until 15 years later that officials finally did enough to significantly curb the practice.
It’s worth your time to read the whole thing.
