The COVID-19 pandemic provided an opportunity for scammers to take advantage of people with medical needs and services, and that’s what one New Hanover County woman is seeing today.
Ann Yvonne Knutson says she hardly ever checked her quarterly Medicare statements, but when she took a look at her latest one, she noticed something was off.
“I get these quarterly statements that I don’t pay attention to, and because I was getting ready for surgery, I thought I would check to see what claims are on there,” Knutson said. “And as I looked at it, I saw that there was a charge for a COVID test on May 9, and I knew I didn’t have a COVID test.”
After reporting the test to Medicare, she discovered this wasn’t the first time she was charged.
“I decided to call Medicare and told them that I didn’t have a COVID test and they discovered that this is going on and this is a fraudulent charge,” Knutson said. “And they continued to look back into my other ones and it went all the way back to January of 2022.”
And those charges add up.
The charges were $100 to $200 each time and Medicare paid $94.08 for every one of them. That means they paid nearly $1,500 on these fraudulent charges—and that’s just in Knutson’s case. Medicare says it has gotten calls about these charges from people all over the country.
Even though this didn’t come out of her pocket, it’s money that’s being taken from taxpayers.
“It’s the Medicare trust that’s going to be our future and the future for the people behind us, the kids behind us,” Knutson said. “So I’d like to just make sure that we do our part.”
Knutson says she knows it can be easy to disregard Medicare statements, especially if you assume there is nothing on them. But taking the time to look them over can make a huge difference.
Medicare says that if you think you’ve spotted fraud on your statement, it’s best to contact them and work through it together.