Medicare fraud is big business, and like most businesses, it has adapted to the new environment of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“The public health emergency created an opportunity for fraudsters to modify and repurpose existing schemes,” a spokesperson for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, or CMS, said in an email. CMS has seen bad actors take advantage of wider demand for telehealth, COVID-19 testing and vaccines as avenues for identity theft and fraudulent billing.
The Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Inspector General, or HHS-OIG, investigates fraud, waste and abuse in federal health care programs, including Medicare. Nearly 9,000 calls came into its fraud hotline each month, on average, from April through September 2021, according to HHS-OIG’s Spring 2022 report to Congress….