Washington, D.C. – A report released by the Health and Human Services last Friday exposed that Medicare has been continuously paying for expensive medications as urgent care for patients who are already dead.
The investigators have taken a look at the claims made from the year 2012 for medications that were used to treat HIV and then had them cross-referenced with the records of death. What the investigators found out was that the Medicare program of the government has paid for drugs of 158 beneficiaries that have already died which cost $1,850 on average for every recipient.
According to Medicare, it’s now working on a fix of the issue that it has been paying for drugs even after its recipients already died in urgent care clinics.
Out of the 348 prescriptions distributed that were found out as issued for dead people in urgent care near me, almost half of them were filled over a week after the patients died. There are even multiple prescriptions that were filled by someone else on behalf of a single dead beneficiary which resulted to the government program’s spending of too much money for nothing.
The investigators said that they don’t have any idea what happened to those drugs dispensed for the dead beneficiaries but stated that there’s a likelihood that they were already diverted to the underground market for prescription drugs. The report submitted by the Health and Human Services said that drugs for HIV are scam targets because they are really expensive that one drug alone can cost around $1,700 for an entire month’s supply.
Medicare is the premier health insurance program of the government that provides coverage for millions of seniors and persons with disability in an urgent care clinic. It was in 2006 when its prescription covered delivered through private insurance plans started as a major expansion of the government health insurance program. It’s just unfortunate that this program is one of the major targets for scams these days.
The investigators who reviewed the issues with Medicare prescriptions that went through for dead people didn’t provide any estimate of the financial impact across the $85 billion per year government program.
While they didn’t give any financial impact estimate, the investigators are positive that if the Medicare wastes are added up, they can amount to millions of dollars.
In a formal response given by the premium health insurance program of the government which is also known as Part D, it agreed with the recommendations of the investigators.
