Cafeoutdoors.com: Medicine, again

We've talked about the state of American medicine before, and I don't pretend to be an expert. I just want to put a little more personal experience here and see what you all think.

I mentioned before that my mom passed away in a nursing home here on Aug. 13. She was 93 and had developed senile dementia.

She was hospitalized for a few days in June with pneumonia, which they were able to clear up. I talked before about the outrageous charges that were made to Medicare and her insurance on that deal - including the ambulance company that doubled its' bill after they found out she had health insurance.

For these 2 1/2 months since she's been gone, I've been getting more copies of medical bills every day - they're all piling on now that she's dead, and most all of it is fraudulent. This stuff is still coming.

I visited mom every other day and talked with her nurses and doctor frequently. I know what care she was getting.

The nursing home doctor is an osteopath - he's about as much of a doctor as I am, in my opinion. After mom got back from the hospital in June he was visiting her once a week in the nursing home. In July he took a blood test and sent it off to verify that she still had low blood potassium (pernicious anemia). She did, and he continued her once-a-month vitamin B-12 injection.

Other than that, mom was taking a generic blood pressure pill that she'd been taking for 40 years. She wasn't getting any other medication or medical care.

I've got copies of bills now for FORTY-SIX lab tests that have been billed and paid for by her insurance company - performed on different dates from June and up to and including the day she died at 6 a.m. The "referring physician" is the house osteopath - the guy doing the billing is a pathologist I've never heard of.

All the lab charges are under $25 each, so I'd guess those low amounts fly under some oversight radar. But there are FORTY-FIVE of them that never happened! I'd guess the osteopath and the pathologist are in cahoots, and when someone at the home dies, well, this is what they do and the osteopath gets a kickback.

In June, the nursing home suggested that Hospice start visiting mom, and I was glad they did. The Hospice nurse visits that nursing home every Tuesday and she had several other patients to see there. She was very nice to mom, talked to her for a few minutes and made sure she was comfortable, and called me with a report every couple of weeks. That IS a nice service, and I'm sure not complaining about that.

But today I got a copy of how much Hospice billed Medicare "A" for about 6 brief nursing visits, and maybe 3 phone calls to me. MEDICARE PAID $5235.45 FOR THAT!

No, I'm not gonna blow the whistle on anybody. It wouldn't do any good, and it would make me enemies here in town. But - THIS STUFF IS GOING ON ALL OVER THE COUNTRY, multiplied by many thousands of times. Dang it, this is why medical costs and insurance are so high and Medicare is in trouble.

The whole health-care system is so fraud-ridden and full of overcharges, there's just no fixing it.

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