Posted on 03/19/2009 5:54:33 AM PDT by TigerLikesRooster
Doctors 'prescribed drugs for dead'
Some 100 Sicilian GPs accused of swindling state
(ANSA) - Trapani, March 18 - Some 100 doctors in this Sicilian city are suspected of prescribing drugs for dead people and pocketing the money.
The general practitioners allegedly wrote prescriptions for people who had died as long as nine years previously, according to tax police.
The GPs are accused of embezzling some 50,000 euros from the Italian state.
Tax police busted the scam after comparing parent IDs with some 30,000 suspect prescriptions issued between 2004 and 2007.
They focused on elderly patients using expensive drugs and found that many of them had died but were still being billed.
The investigators are sifting through millions of other scripts and say more doctors ''could be implicated''.
Scams involving dead patients have surfaced several times in recent years.
On one occasion, 450 doctors and specialists operating in the Venice area were charged with systematically defrauding the health board out of millions of euros by ''trafficking'' in dead patients in order to claim reimbursement for bogus tests and prescriptions.
Dead Sicilian people ping.
Ain't that the truth! The metabolically challenged always vote Demoncrat.
Or the Sicilian equivalent ...
That would be "absentee". Have you ever seen the voter catacombs of Palermo? :-]
LOL!
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