Medical Mafia

...Facts In

Is your doctor part of the Medical Mafia? Chances are pretty good that he may be. For you see, he may be involved with adding millions of dollars to the health care burden already burdening and bankrupting American families. One of a number of government estimates shows that fraud adds some 10-20 percent to U.S. health care costs, which are approaching over $1 trillion a year.

And it doesn't even have to be "fraud". How about a $4,000 bill for the removal of a impacted lymph node that take 15 minutes to do and 45 minutes in the recovery room while the area cut out clots properly? Or $12,000 to amputate a toe which included a two day hospital stay and the anesthesiologist?

Or how about $30,000 for a hip replacement that takes a few hours? Why would they even need to commit fraud if this kind of insanity is allowed?

My wife has atrial fibrillation, which is a heart condition that many folks live with. To get converted back to normal sinus rhythm she has to have a "cardio conversion" for which the actual act lasts about 15 seconds but they spend a lot of unnecessary time and effort preparing you for the "shock" that gets your heart back in rhythm. I suspect the reason for that is because if they are going to charge you $5,000 for the 15 second procedure they want you to think it takes more than 15 seconds. After all, if you die on the way to the hospital from an automobile accident do the medics in the ambulance prepare you for the shock they give you to try to get you back?

Apparently even the FBI is getting involved with officials stating such abuses include fraudulent billing schemes by medical equipment suppliers; hospital billing frauds; psychiatric hospital and diet-clinic rip-offs; nursing home scams; and "rolling lab" swindles that prey on the elderly and loot private insurance companies as well as Medicare.

The FBI has deployed hundreds of agents nationwide that work on health care cases. Meanwhile the Justice Department has assigned positions to the job and formed a health care unit within its criminal division. But despite evidence of widespread white-collar theft, prosecutors have not gone after cases they regard as mere pocket change. Many prosecutors apparently only accept criminal health care cases that involve $100,000 or more, because their workload is already so overburdened.

Understand this basic premise. Doctors don't really want you well because people who are well don't pay. So in actuality they really want you to be sick.

But as for scams...

Those Rolling Labs. According to the justice department, the vulnerability of the health care system to fraud is illustrated by California schemes that have involved more than $1 billion in fraudulent billing from as many as 200 physicians and other providers. The schemes involved getting people with health insurance to visit mobile labs, called "rolling labs," where non-invasive tests -- such as health and blood pressure movements -- were conducted. The labs and doctors use phony diagnoses when submitting the insurance claims. Although some of the owners of these labs have been successfully prosecuted, no money has yet been recovered. Some six similar schemes are still known to be operating in Southern California.

When a profession proliferates on folks that are ill, why would they want you to be well? That’s the final question you have to ask yourself whenever you see one of those Doctors who went to a medical school that taught them how to follow the plan of the “club” that you and I aren’t members of.

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