Where Your Medicare Dollars Go

The recent release of Medicare data continues to reveal valuable new information. The latest is that Medicare pays $5 billion annually for ambulance services, more than is paid to cancer doctors. More importantly, a portion of these ambulance payments go to what are essentially taxi services that are transporting patients who can drive themselves or take taxis at much lower costs. Some cases are so bad that the government filed a fraud suit against ambulance companies.

A large amount of fraudulent ambulance spending is coming from rides to and from dialysis treatment, according to a Medpac report last year. Dialysis patients must get treatment three days a week for years while they await a kidney transplant, making them a predictable, stable source of revenue for fraudsters, Leahy said.

While Medicare will pay for a non-emergency ambulance ride for someone so ill they couldn’t get to their medical appointments or treatment any other way, it is not supposed to be used by patients who can walk, sit or ride in a wheelchair.

Of the $5 billion Medicare spent on ambulance trips in 2011, $700 million was for rides to dialysis centers, a 20 percent increase since 2007, according to Medpac. Medicare could save more than $400 million a year if the states spending the most on ambulance rides per dialysis patient were brought down to the average levels, it said.