Medical Malpractice

What should the penalty be for doctors and hospitals for Medicare fraud?

Doctors and hospitals have been gaming the system for years, cheating taxpayers out of billions of dollars. What should we do to these criminals when they are caught?

Public Comments

1. they should be stripped of they money lol and it should be paided to the victim
2. That problem will take care of itself, as more and more doctors and hospitals refuse to accept Medicare.
3. Prison
4. Yes because their reimbursements are too low, but at least the patients are served through Medicare and Medicaid. Years ago, it was the patients who cheated the system, now that costs are so high, the providers are the culprits.
5. Do you even know what "Medicare Fraud" is? It's whatever the govt auditors say it is. It could be a mistake of the billing clerks who have to key in all the data, something like recording that the doctor saw the patient on March 31st when she really saw the patient on the 21st. It could be some bit of information that's not written down in the chart. It could be a duplicate claim because the govt is so slow in paying that sometimes the charge is sent in twice. Most "Medicare Fraud" is not what the govt overlords want you to believe it is, something like doctors charging huge sums on patients they never saw or something. Hospitals are another bag of cats - no idea what the feds mean when they allege "Medicare Fraud" against hospitals but I bet the vast majority of it is also *fraudulent* "fraud." Simple errors in coding, unavoidable and systematic contradictions in the system where the govt auditor might feel that something should have been X when the people who were actually there and provided the care felt that Y was a more accurate description and so on. The whole system is so ridiculously complicated and absurd, literally the Catch-22 monstrosity of our times. It's worse than the tax system where 10 different trained accountants can do your taxes and each come up with a different figure and then they call 9/10 or all 10 honest efforts to make sense of the thing "fraud." No wonder so many doctors refuse to take Medicare.