Medicare costs are being heavily debated in Congress and by the presidential candidates. Meanwhile, one of the largest expenditures of Medicare is in fraudulent claims due to inefficiencies in the current system which allows for this to happen.
Houston’s Riverside General Hospital was identified this week as operating fraudulent Medicare services with an executive arrested for the scheme involving kickbacks to patient recruiters and the owners of homes for the elderly and disabled.
Mohammad Khan, age 63, was arrested and charged with seven counts: conspiracy to commit health care fraud, conspiracy to pay health care kickbacks and five additional health care kickback charges.
Riverside hospital is not charged with any crime. However, they also somehow employed this executive who is called “doctor”, yet is not licensed to practice medicine in Texas. He has been arrested and placed in custody.
Caregivers, seniors and all medical professionals must be watchful for situations that perhaps just don’t smell right.
A Houston Chronicle investigation last year documented the continuing flow of federal taxpayer dollars to for-profit mental health clinics, known as partial hospitalization programs, or PHPs, even though they require no license to operate in Texas and collect millions from Medicare.
Texas, Louisiana and Florida, which generate 76 percent of all PHP claims to Medicare, are states well-known as high-fraud areas to the dollar-doling federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
Medicare fraud or any activities which could seem fraudulent, can easily be reported through the office of Inspector General hotline. In order for more money to be availble to pay for actual senior care needs such as prescriptions and caregiving, it is important to begin to place a permanent dent into Medicare fraud.
