Two years ago, Michael Moore took on the health care industry in his documentary movie, “SiCKO.” In the movie, Moore includes a security video showing a disoriented elderly woman in a hospital gown and slippers wandering in the gutter of a busy Los Angeles street. Kaiser Permanente Bellflower Medical Center near Los Angeles had discharged her and sent her off in a cab. Eventually, a staff member from the Union Rescue Mission in the city’s crime-ridden Skid Row area comes out to help the woman.

Enacted in 1986, the federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA) made it illegal to refuse health care for patients who are unable to pay. The March 2006 incident was widely documented. This May, Kaiser Permanente, the country’s biggest health maintenance organization, reached a settlement with Los Angeles prosecutors requiring Kaiser to make changes to end the dumping of homeless patients on streets.

Today, the LA Times reported that three Southern California hospitals were accused of bilking the system by paying recruiters thousands of dollars to find homeless people on Skid Row to fill hospital beds. Recruiters was used to recruit homeless individuals for unnecessary hospital treatment, and then fraudulently billing Medi-Cal and Medicare for millions of dollars in unwarranted compensation.

The raids cap what law enforcement sources told The Times was a nearly two-year investigation of alleged medical fraud on skid row.
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The hospitals allegedly were aided by a patient recruiting operation on skid row that plucked homeless people from the streets and delivered them with fake medical conditions to the hospitals.

According to Los Angeles City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo, hospitals, physicians and transporting ambulances would submit their claims to Medicare or Medi-Cal soon after the homeless were sent back to Skid Row. City Attorney had this to say:

“Today, we are sending the message that those who would seek to defraud our health care system, and those who would callously exploit mentally-impaired and drug addicted homeless men and women to turn a profit will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law,” said City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo. “These criminals thought they could get away with this scheme because – they figured – no one cares about the homeless on Skid Row. They were dead wrong.”

And here in Texas, the first public medical school and hospital in the United States has decided to make their money the old fashion way – “shutting off access to the uninsured and Medicaid patients.”

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Tags: heath care, Michael Moore, Sicko, Texas, uninsured |  Print This Post |
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