Ethical Challenges in Medicare Scam
In the period from 2000 to 2007, more than 478,000 claims were filed with Medicare in the names of between 16,500 and 18,200 dead physicians. As a result, the Medicare program-which insures the elderly and disabled-paid at least $92.8 million in fraudulent claims. The actual amount paid could be higher since the study which uncovered the fraud only looked at physicians who had been dead for at least one year. The study was conducted under the auspices of the investigations panel of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs (Zhang, 2008).
Live physicians are also associated with Medicare fraud. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) estimates that 27,000 health-care providers-including individuals and institutions-failed to pay more than $2 billion in federal taxes for 2006. Medicare is an ideal target program for fraud because of the sheer size of its operations: the program processes 1.1 billion claims per year and spent more than $400 billion on 43 million beneficiaries in 2007 (Zhang, 2008).
There are a number of ethical issues raised by this article. There is, of course, the fundamental issue of stealing represented by the fraudulent action itself. Those who filed the fraudulent claims and who received the payments were stealing from the government, which ultimately means that they were stealing from taxpayers. Implementing safeguards to ensure that payments are made only to living physicians, however, may impose additional burden on providers with the result that fees charged to patients might be increased to cover the increased costs (Stanton, 2001).
A second ethical issue raised by the article is that of tax fraud. Some consider not paying the full amount due on taxes to be another form of stealing while others do not think that this transgression rises to that level of m
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