Healthcare Daily Digest for 30 January 2013: It Was an Honor Being Nominated, or How Medicare Didn't Pick Me for Its Most Wanted List

That honor goes to Won Suk Lee, an acupuncturist and owner of two medical clinics in Los Angeles. While I totally could have bested him in the Swimsuit portion of the competition, he cleanly leads the way in the Fraud category.

Lee was able to bilk the government program out of $1.2 million, according to authorities. Lee is now vacationing (i.e., hiding out from extradition) in South Korea.

Steve Ryan, assistant special agent in charge in Los Angeles for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ inspector general, said that from 2009 to 2011, Lee used a physical therapy clinic as a front to bill for services, such as acupuncture and massage, that are not covered by Medicare.

Ryan then, in this news story, does the equivalent of leaving the keys in his Porsche, by dropping this soundbite: “There’s such a large amount of money in Medicare that it continues to be a very attractive target for people who want to steal and commit fraud.”

Next years Medicare Most Wanted competition just got a lot more heated.

What do you guys think about these Wednesday headlines?

• There’s Irony Here, if You Have the Patience: From a blog post titled Uncertainties surround new HIPAA breach notification rule — it takes eleventeen paragraphs to get to the part that might be about the uncertainty. It’s — wait for it — unclear.

• Profiles in Technology: Spend some time getting to know Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta CIO and Chief Supply Chain Officer, Praveen Chopra in this profile from Forbes.com. Technology is going to, for the foreseeable future, be an aid and a thorn for most healthcare organizations. Get insight from a guy whose job it is to think about this every day.

• You Know Who Generally Isn’t Eligible for Company-Sponsored Health Insurance: Temps! (That’s not the point of this article, of course, but it’s an interesting intersection, right? Why use more temps? It’s not like there’s an employee shortage.)

• Thank God SOMEONE is Trying to Save Medicare Millions: Because Medicare, as we learned above, is essentially a giant bag leaking money. Which is why this headline is so heartening: “Washington state best practices project is saving Medicaid dollars.”

• “Bone Up!” She Says: MarketWatch.com’s Elizabeth O’Brien suggests that if your head is aswirl with HMOs and PPOs — get ready for ACOs, which’ll be just as confusing.