Government run health care pays dead doctors

HT Brian Thomas

In July, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations revealed Medicare's latest embarrassment: significant payments for medical services ordered by dead doctors -- $60 million to $92 million such claims paid between 2000 and 2007. Some doctors had been dead for more than 10 years.

Dead doctors are not the first to embarrass Medicare, which also has paid millions of dollars in treatments for dead patients, many of whom apparently start new treatments months or years after death. Deportees, previously banished from the country, and prisoners (who receive healthcare through other systems) also show up, when they obviously should not, in Medicare's paid claims.

For the ''dead doctors'' problem, the Office of Inspector General for Health and Humand Services proposes the same formulaic approach used for every other category of obviously bogus claims: They say that the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) should obtain timely and accurate data regarding deaths, deportations and imprisonment from other relevant agencies, and then implement system-edits so that their computers can auto-reject bad claims.