Health Insurers Make It Easy for Scammers to Steal Millions
Tip of the iceberg.<p>I know a fellow that got a bill a drug testing company didn&#x27;t mean to send him.  He was meant to check for a single restricted medication because of some treatment regimen he was on.  Instead, it checked for pretty much everything and automatically rechecked both positive and negative results.<p>Long story short, a $50 test turned into a $2500 test, invisible to all but the testing company and the insurance company.<p>The testing company told him to ignore the bill and, indeed, he wasn&#x27;t charged that amount.  It piqued his curiosity and offended his sense of fairness and it led him down a disturbing rabbit hole of uncovering some very bad behavior and desperately trying to get folks to do notice what was happening and do something about it.<p>Basically, this company seems to be in the business of bribing doctors through ridiculously priced leases in their medical office that they pay for to house their &#x27;testing advisors&#x27;.  We&#x27;re talking on the order of $15K a month for a broom closet.  In return, doctors use the testing company&#x27;s pre-filled documents for requesting testing -- standing orders for the whole suite of tests with re-checks rather than just what is needed.<p>By the time the insurance companies caught on they&#x27;d amassed a huge war chest and were more than happy to tie up the courts fighting claims that they&#x27;re doing something wrong.<p>One reason I support universal healthcare even though, generally, I&#x27;m a free-market proponent, is because it would make this kind of fraud a lot easier to spot and the federal government has a lot more tools to bring to bear to stop it.