Feds to probe misuse of Medicare info
A government watchdog is launching a nationwide probe into how marketers may be getting seniors’ personal Medicare information via misuse of a government system, officials said Friday.
The audit will be formally announced next week said Tesia Williams, a spokeswoman for the Health and Human Services inspector general’s office. It follows a narrower probe which found that an electronic system for pharmacies to verify Medicare coverage was being used for potentially inappropriate searches seemingly tied to marketing. It raised red flags about possible fraud.
The watchdog agency’s decision comes amid a wave of relentlessly efficient telemarketing scams targeting Medicare recipients and involving everything from braces to DNA cheek swabs.
For years, seniors have been admonished not to give out their Medicare information to people they don’t know. But a report on the inspector general’s initial probe, also released Friday, details how sensitive details can still get to marketers. It can happen even when a
Medicare beneficiary thinks he or she is dealing with a trustworthy entity such as a pharmacy or doctor’s office.
Key personal details gleaned from Medicare’s files can then be cross-referenced with databases of individual phone numbers, allowing marketers to home in with their calls.
The initial audit focused on 30 pharmacies and other service providers that were frequently pinging a Medicare system created for drugstores.
The electronic system is intended to verify a senior’s eligibility at the sales counter. It can validate coverage and personal details on millions of individuals. Analyzing records from 2013-15, investigators discovered most of the audited pharmacies, along with a software company and a drug compounding service also scrutinized, weren’t necessarily filling prescriptions.
Instead, they appeared to have been tapping into the system for potentially inappropriate marketing.
Medicare stipulates that the electronic queries are supposed to be used to bill for prescriptions. But investigators found some pharmacies submitted tens of thousands of queries that could not be matched to prescriptions.