Exactly.

That’s like the days when you could set up a mail drop, call yourself a DME vendor, get a bunch of Social Security numbers, bill a bunch of quad canes and manual wheelchairs and stuff that doesn’t grab much attention, get paid what you’re paid, and close the mailbox before Medicare got wise.

This stuff reflects failure of Medicare to do the most basic oversight. Don’t blame the doctors “conspiracy of silence”, blame Medicare lack of oversight and the medical board failure to police some of these basics. In the meantime, they spend money going after docs for failure to get the Urdu translator or figuring out if we’re going after the docs for undertreating pain or giving too many controlled drugs. Flip a coin.

And “pity the poor doctor” wailing……..get a clue pal. There’s a billing code for this, and Medicare actually pays for that essay. So there’s that much more money going out of the system.

Oh, and money like that, payments like that to physicians, doesn’t get counted as “administrative”. Makes the funny math easier when the single-payer advocates make their push for “Medicare for all”.

The decision to pay for hospice care is between Medicare and the hospice provider. It is futile and inappropriate to expect the physician, who has no authority over either organization, to provide the needed financial oversight of the transaction. If Medicare is paying for hospice care for hemorrhoid patients, that is a failure of Medicare’s internal oversight procedures.

Apparently, that was my essay.

The best solution would be for Medicare to use its own staff to evaluate the need for hospice care, durable medical equipment, etc.

Let’s just quash the Part B program rather than make it so administratively unworkable that no one will want to deal with it anyway, the way we are going.