Health Insurance Fraud: What You Should Know
Health insurance fraud represents one of America’s largest taxpayer rip-offs ever, costing Americans literally billions of dollars every year.
Due to rampant deception, scams and abuse in the health care system, consumers are forced to pay the price–literally–through escalating medical costs and rising health insurance premiums.
And government programs like Medicare and Medicaid, designed to help the low-income and elderly, represent two of the biggest losers of all.
Health Insurance Scams
According to the Insurance Information Institute, health providers and facilities such as doctors, hospitals, nursing homes, diagnostic labs and attorneys routinely attempt to defraud the health insurance system…with devastating results.
How do they do it? In a number of ways, including:
- Billing health insurance companies for expensive treatments, tests or equipment patients never had or never received
- Double- or triple-billing health insurers for the same treatments
- Giving health care recipients unnecessary, dangerous, or life-threatening treatments
- Selling low-cost health insurance coverage from fake insurance companies
- Stealing medical information and using it to bill health insurance companies for phantom treatments
If health insurance fraud knocks on your door, these types of scams may leave you with medical debts, damaged credit ratings, falsified health records, a high level of stress and overpriced health insurance premiums…or the inability to get any health insurance at all.
So what can you do about it?
Report it; then fight back!