Posted on 04/15/2013 4:08:48 PM PDT by SMGFan
If you watch daytime TV or have been stuck watching daytime TV while visiting your parents, surely youre familiar with The Scooter Store. The power wheelchair vendor has had some trouble lately, including accusations of Medicare and Medicaid fraud, a raid by the FBI, and even a lawsuit from the companys hometown, of New Braunfels, Texas. The company laid off most of its employees, and plans to deal directly with health care providers, rather than blanketing the airwaves and selling directly to consumers.
Those investigations came after a scathing investigative piece by CBS News about the company. (Warning: the video at that link plays automatically.) Former salesmen and doctors who prescribed chairs in the past explained the companys tactics: contact doctors offices incessantly to wear them down and convince them to prescribe scooters and power chairs whether the patient really needed one or not, and to depend on bureaucratic incompetence and error to get them approved by Medicare and Medicaid.
(Excerpt) Read more at consumerist.com ...
When I was in college the athletic trainer gave me darvon for shin splints.
That night it seemed that my heart was beating irregularly. The trainer told me to quit taking it. I am still not sure if that is what caused my heart to seem to race then slow down but something did.
My arthritic mother leans on a regular shopping cart as she pushes it, she refuses to use an electric scooter, she says, she doesn’t want people to think she’s lazy. She’s 92 years old.
My Mom did that, too, age 94, until her leg problems grew too much for her to support herself. She was pretty cheerful until her death, except she had severe ulcers on her legs which were horribly painful and which ultimately forced her to be bedridden. It wasn’t pretty. She ran out of good days a couple of months before she died.
To be clear, I don’t begrudge anyone whatever they need. But I don’t support the endless medical scams going on in nearly every sector.
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