Fraud and Florida's multimillion-dollar wheelchair

By Tom Brown

MIAMI (Reuters) - One Miami-area medical equipment supplier managed to bill the U.S. government so often for a wheelchair it ended up costing $5 million.

Last year south Florida accounted for 80 percent of the drugs billed across the entire United States for Medicare beneficiaries with HIV/AIDS, even though the region only had about one in 10 of eligible HIV/AIDS patients.

Fraud against Medicare, the federal health insurer for America's 43 million elderly and disabled, has become so prevalent that it may rival the illegal drug trade as a crime of choice in a state long renowned for cocaine cartels, political shenanigans and swampland real estate scams.

In one case, said Alex Acosta, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida, a company had billed Medicare for millions of dollars worth of specially formulated asthma medication prepared at what the owner claimed to be his own local pharmacy.

"The person wasn't a pharmacist, he was an air conditioner repairman. When we raided the so-called pharmacy where he mixed all these aerosols it was nothing more than a broom closet where all we found was a can of tar," Acosta told Reuters.

Fraud targeting health-care programs for seniors is not unique to south Florida, where many elderly Americans have retired to end their days in the sunshine.

But the authorities say it's become a huge and growing industry here.

"If you're a criminal and your sole goal is to make money, health-care fraud looks increasingly attractive," said Acosta.

"You can make several million dollars from health-care fraud and the penalties are much less severe than they are for narcotics trafficking," he added.

The Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees hundreds of billions of dollars in annual Medicare spending, reported last month that south Florida seemed to be playing an unusually large role in the provision of infusion drug therapy -- medicines delivered intravenously outside a hospital or nursing home -- to Medicare beneficiaries diagnosed with HIV or

AIDS.

'A SMALL DENT"

In the second half of last year just three counties -- Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach -- accounted for half the total infusion drug therapy charges nationwide, and nearly 80 percent of the amount of drugs, billed across the entire United States for HIV/AIDS patients on Medicare, the report said.

It said the disparity was even greater before, most notably in the first half of 2005.

At the same time, only about 10 percent of national Medicare beneficiaries with HIV/AIDS lived in the three south Florida counties between July and December 2006.