
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, May 30, 1995                   TAG: 9506010002
SECTION: EDITORIALS                    PAGE: A-4   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

MEDICARE

IF YOU'RE still angry about how much the savings-and-loan fiasco cost taxpayers, shut your ears to this word from Sen. William Cohen, R-Maine: In about the same period, fraud in Medicare and other government-sponsored health-care programs has cost four times as much.

Indeed, Cohen estimates, the public has been bilked for $418 billion in the past five years by assorted health-care scams. Yet when Cohen introduced a bill this year to try to remedy the situation, his Republican colleagues in Congress paid little attention. They were too busy telling horror stories about children exploiting the government by pretending to be mentally retarded or disabled, or feigning poverty and hunger to qualify for free or reduced-price school lunches and food stamps.

That's not to say there's no fraud in government programs for disabled and poor children. But it's hard to imagine that kids, even in criminal cahoots with parents, could devise the kind of schemes that the Medicare-Medicaid mob is getting away with. FBI Director Louis Freeh and investigators for the General Accounting Office have told congressional committees of:

``Wave therapy,'' the latest no-pun-intended craze in psychiatric hospitals, in which a doctor walks by and waves at a patient - then bills the government $125 for individual therapy.

A van service that billed Medicare for $62,000 over 16 months for ambulance trips to transport one patient 240 times.

Billings to Medicare for $18 million in 1992 - up from $217,000 in 1990 - for "orthotic" body jackets. These are customized devices to hold immobile patients with muscular and spinal conditions. An investigation showed that 95 percent of those payments were actually for relatively inexpensive seat cushions.

Last week, Freeh again stressed to legislators that existing laws are inadequate to deal with increasingly complex health-care rip-offs, and so are funds for fraud prevention and detection - activities that surely would pay for themselves many times over in light of what Cohen says is a $100 billion-a-year scandal.

Now, with Congress contemplating huge cuts in Medicare spending and benefits, to, they say, keep the program from going belly-up by 2001, one might think curtailing benefits for the Medicare crooks might be a priority. Can lawmakers convince the elderly that this would not be more cost-effective than cracking down on kids cheating for a pint of milk?

by CNB