Re: medicare status - are there really 4?

[Guest guest]

Unless you are filing incident too as an employee of the person whose number is being used---it IS medicare fraud. Depending on your speciality, you do not have to enroll in the Medicare program. Just be sure you patients know you do not accept assignment.

Subject: medicare status - are there really 4?To: "IMP Yahoo Group" < >Date: Tuesday, November 25, 2008, 8:15 AM

I know we've discussed this frequently in the past, but I talked to a Medicare rep for Virginia on the phone yesterday and this was the information I took home from the conversation and just wanted to run it by the group. My situation is that I work full time for an UC practice who bills medicare for the services I provide with a medicare number. I wondered if I needed my own number to see Medicare patients. I plan to not accept any insurance including medicare as payment, but didn't want to commit "fraud" or some such nonsense by seeing medicare patients and having them pay me directly with the understanding that they could not receive reimbursement from Medicare for these services. Talking to the rep we discussed the 3 options associated with registering with Medicare: par, non-par and opting out. Understanding that if I register and opt out, I could not decide to become non-par (if my practice

developed in a way to make this reasonable) for 2 years, I asked about simply not registering as a medicare provider and not having a medicare number for my housecall practice. He couldn't see any problem with this as long as the patient understood I had no contract with Medicare at all and that they could not be reimbursed by Medicare for my services. According to the rep, I wouldn't even need the personal contract with the patient that opt out MDs must have as I would be totally outside the medicare system with no contractual relationship between Medicare and myself. Although, I may draw up a simple acknowledgement form or contract for medicare patients to sign just to cover my ass. This seems to make sense to me, but knowing how screwed up our system is by lawyers and arcane regualtions, I wondered if it is correct?Straz