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This year the federal government is on track to crack down on nearly twice as many health care fraud cases compared to last year, according to California Watch.
Some of the prosecutions close to home relied on parishioners at a church in Los Angeles, postal workers in Whittier pretending to suffer from — what else? — a fear of dogs and non-existent cancer patients to conduct their scams.
Here are some examples that California Watch culled from recent local prosecutions:
One of the ways that the government has tried to save Medicare $27 billion over a decade is attempting to change the way it pays suppliers of power wheelchairs and prosthetic limbs, items that are frequently involved in health fraud prosecutions, according to California Watch.
Cracking down on health care fraud has been upheld as a (seemingly rare) bipartisan solution to saving the government money on health care costs, and Southern California is known as a health care fraud hotspot.