FROM THE PUBLISHER | Fraudulent bills

She’s been dead nearly three years. I don’t think the booster was going to help her much.

We didn’t get a bill, since Medicare covered the expense. But of course we paid, and so did you. Medicare is a government program, so in the end we all have to cough up the money for fraud.

I called a friend who knows a lot about the subject; he had been billed for, among other things, a catheter that he had no need for and, for that matter, never got. He recommended calling the fraud line, which I did. I also Googled the company, which is called Cipher Global, LLC; it has an “F” rating from the Better Business Bureau, which is probably all anybody needs to know.

This sort of boondoggle goes on to a mind-boggling degree. It’s something on the order of $60 billion per year that’s lost to fraud.

I haven’t given much thought to the question of how to stop it, and so I hesitate to offer any sort of recommendations. Stopping it would, I imagine, inevitably also make it tougher for Medicare recipients to get claims approved. There’s just inherently a tradeoff.

But one general concept does immediately jump to mind: How about NOT approving claims for services provided to people who’ve been dead a couple years?

Isn’t there a way for, say, Social Security to notify Medicare when somebody dies, so that a big red “DECEASED” appears on the screen when the fraudster company tries to collect for a COVID vaccine? The clerk at the Medicare office could at least get an alert not to click the “approve” button.

Can’t be too hard, can it?