Keep Them Safe
Caregiving 101 | Play Defense | Go on Offense | Ask for Help
Caregiving 101
The health and safety of your parent increasingly becomes your responsibility as they grow older. Scam artists make the job tougher. Dishonest or phony health-care providers see seniors as easy targets — figuring them to be more trusting, easily swayed, and too forgetful or embarrassed when it comes to reporting a crime.
Health-care cons include:
- Billing for services not performed.
- Billing the patient for a service already covered by Medicaid, or charging the difference between the provider’s fee and what Medicare pays.
- Double billing Medicaid and the patient’s insurer for the same service.
- Doing unnecessary, or fake, tests at so-called “rolling laboratories” at health clubs, retirement homes or shopping malls.
- Billing Medicaid for a name-brand drug after prescribing a cheaper generic.
- Offering “free” medical equipment, then billing insurers for items that either were not needed or never delivered.
- Selling Medicare supplemental insurance plans that can jeopardize standard Medicare coverage, contain hidden costs and aren’t accepted by doctors.
Abuse and Neglect
Looking out for Mom or Dad doesn’t stop when you find a health-care facility that promises quality comfort and care. Watch for signs of abuse, and not just the physical kind. Sadly, some health-care workers strike their patients, withhold food and medication, or just ignore them. Financial abuse is a more subtle assault. The care center dips into a resident’s trust fund, for example, to pay for services already covered by Medicaid or uses money in ways not authorized by your parents or by you, the ultimate caregiver.
| Drug diversion is another form of abuse. A resident is deprived of proper medication by health-care workers who sell the drug or use it themselves, by doctors who sell prescriptions, or by nurses who order medication without a doctor’s approval. All this is health-care fraud, too. |
Play Defense: Steps you can take to protect your parents from fraudulent health-care schemes.
Go on Offense: Steps you can take if you believe your parents have been cheated or abused.
Ask for Help: List of agencies and organizations you can contact for information, answers and more.