Health care fraud

Health care fraud includes health insurance fraud, drug fraud, and medical fraud. Health insurance fraud occurs when a company or an individual defrauds an insurer or government health care program, such as Medicare (United States) or equivalent State programs. The manner in which this is done varies, and persons engaging in fraud are always seeking new ways to circumvent the law. Damages from fraud can be recovered by use of the False Claims Act, most commonly under the qui tam provisions which rewards an individual for being a "whistleblower", or relator (law).

The FBI estimates that Health Care Fraud costs American tax payers $80 billion a year. Of this amount $2.5 billion was recovered through False Claims Act cases in FY 2010. Most of these cases were filed under qui tam provisions.

Over the course of FY 2010, whistleblowers were paid a total of $307,620,401.00 for their part in bringing the cases forward.

There are several different schemes used to defraud the Health care system.

Often done as a way of billing Medicare for things that never happened. This can involve forging the signature of those enrolled in Medicare, and the use of bribes or "kickbacks" to corrupt medical professionals.

Billing Medicare programs for services that are more costly than the actual procedure that was done.

Similar to upcoding of services, but involving the use of medical equipment. An example is billing Medicare for a power-assisted wheelchair while only giving the patient a manual wheelchair.

In this case a provider does not submit exactly the same bill, but changes some small portion like the date in order to charge Medicare twice for the same service rendered. Rather than a single claim being filed twice, the same service is billed two times in an attempt to be paid twice.

Bills for a particular service are submitted in piecemeal, that appear to be staggered out over time. These services would normally cost less when bundled together, but by manipulating the claim, a higher charge is billed to Medicare resulting in a higher pay out to the party committing the fraud.

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