For two decades the Justice Department has spent a sizable fortune cracking down on criminals ripping off Medicare, but the federal health insurance program still bleeds billions of dollars a year due to persistent fraud in Miami and other hot spots across the country. Although authorities have won thousands of fraud convictions, technology has made it easier for criminals to steal millions of patients’ identities off the internet to churn out false Medicare claims. They then launder the illicit profits through shell companies, bank accounts and luxury assets — not unlike drug traffickers, federal officials say.
, where medical equipment scams involving knee and back braces continue to flourish alongside more sophisticated billing schemes in the expanding field of telemedicine and genetic cancer testing. But such criminal activity has evolved into a franchise of fraud, expanding far beyond this region to metro areas in New York, Houston, Detroit and Los Angeles, to name a few, according to officials. Earlier this year, for example, federal prosecutors charged a Phoenix couple who owned wound-care businesses and two nurse practitioners with conspiring to defraud Medicare out of $900 million by targeting elderly patients — many of them terminally ill.
Over a period of 16 months, Medicare paid the couple $600 million as part of their fraudulent billing scheme, averaging more than $1 million per patient for medically unnecessary or ill-advised amniotic wound grafts. The cou.