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Originally Posted by shrink
I believe you are 100% correct about everything you had to say. For one thing, I submitted a fraud claim against Dr. Qamar in 2012. I noticed on my Medicare statement that Qamar had billed for both a treadmill and a chemical stress test. I never had a treadmill test (nor was I offered one, as the chemical stress test was far more lucrative for the practice). The Medicare Fraud rep with whom I spoke told me that I might not be informed of the status of my complaint, as there was already an ongoing investigation of this practice! What??? To make matters worse, apparently some years ago, Dr. Qamar was under investigation by Medicare, with the concerns being "founded". None the less, he was allowed to continue to practice and to bilk the system of multiple millions of dollars, not to mention the harm he did to perhaps thousands of patients who underwent unnecessary procedures. When I tried to talk with the Medicare rep about the unnecessary procedures (as spelled out by our second opinion cardiologist), I was told there was "nothing that Medicare could do about the tests that a licensed physician chooses to order", and that the only report that they could file was if a procedure was billed that hadn't actually been done!
On another note in reference to your post, up North, the husband of my closest friend is an ER doctor in a mid-sized community hospital. He has been brought in on the carpet (and in fact, threatened with loss of employment) because he was judged to be too thorough, and thus, not turning patients over fast enough. Because the hospital is urban, many of the patients who come in are drug seeking. My friend's husband was told repeatedly not to waste time checking the drug registries, but to give the patients a short supply of narcotics and get them out of there. I realize this is an entirely different scenerio from the Qamar deal, but reflects some of the pressures that undermine a functional health care system.
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Thank you. So in other words, abusers are not only allowed, but they are
facilitated in running roughshod over the Medicare and Medicaid fraud detection and enforcement agents, to wreck the system for the innocent elderly and disabled--the weakest among us.
When is somebody in charge going to admit that for every fraudulent billion dollars squandered, it's a billion that did NOT get used to pay for those who need the insurance, and it's another billion that the shrinking taxpayer base will have taken out of its hide AGAIN??