A letter from Jonathan Lavin (Voice, Sept. 7) expressed outrage about the fact that Illinois may be losing as much as $1.3 billion per year through Medicare “fraud and abuse.” In fact, his organization, the Suburban Area Agency on Aging, is setting up a group of “fraud busters” to combat this problem.
I imagine that Mr. Lavin’s group is interested in overt fraud, but there is also an abundance of what I call covert fraud in these days of the popularity of so-called “alternative” therapies. The only thing most of these have in common is that they remain of unproven efficacy and, in some cases, safety.
I’m not sure just how many of these alternative practitioners receive money from Medicare, but one widespread one does–chiropractic. The only scientifically proven use of this form of treatment is in certain kinds of lower back pain, yet chiropractors in my area still advertise that they can cure, among other conditions, “chronic ear infections.”
This latter advertising is contrary to the statement of the American Chiropractic Association in the Wall Street Journal in 1993: “Any doctor of chiropractic who would seek to substitute spinal manipulation for antibiotic therapy in the treatment of bacterial infections, as was reported in the Journal article, is acting counter to recognized and accepted clinical practice. The ACA recognizes that antibiotic therapy is the widely accepted form of treatment for bacterial infections.”
This leads me to wonder how many chiropractors may be billing Medicare for treatment of conditions not amenable to their procedures, within their diagnostic training or whose treatment is contradicted by their own association. The door is open already, and I hope that Mr. Lavin’s fraud busters can get their feet inside. I hope, too, that his group may prevent other unproven “alternatives” from getting inside the same door. As a taxpayer, I cannot hope for less.
