New Reporting Requirements For Companies That Make Payments to Medicare Recipients in Personal Injury Lawsuits or Workers' Compensation Claims
By Guest Blogger Emily Grande
A few weeks ago, I attended the Grocery Manufacturer Association’s webinar on Consumer Complaint Management – Current Issues and Effective Procedures. One important topic covered was the new Medicare reporting requirements for self-insured companies that are defendants in personal injury lawsuits or that are paying workers’ compensation claims. If a company satisfies a judgment or settles with a personal injury plaintiff who is a Medicare recipient, the company must report the payment to Medicare, as required by Section 111 of the Medicare, Medicaid, and SCHIP Extension Act of 2007. These new reporting requirements were enacted to save the government’s health care programs money by arming them with the information needed to recover payments made to Medicare recipients for medical expenses in personal injury and workers’ compensation cases. In such cases, the defendant, not Medicare, is responsible for the plaintiff’s health care bills. The eye-popping penalty for a company’s failure to report payments to Medicare recipients is $1,000 per day per claim. In addition, Medicare can pursue legal action against the settling company if it fails to ensure that Medicare is reimbursed regardless of whether the company has already paid the plaintiff. As if that weren’t enough, Medicare can pursue double damages.
The registration deadline for the program was September 30, 2009, but there do not appear to be penalties for failing to register on time. The first required reporting period is the second quarter of 2010. All personal injury settlements made after January 1, 2010 must be reported, and all workers’ compensation claims considered “open” on January 1, 2009 must be reported.
A guide for responsible reporting entities can be found at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services website.
The presenter at the GMA’s webinar was attorney Thomas S. Thornton III and his presentation slides are available here.
The High Cost of Loving Rojak
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Rojak is an important Singaporean dish. To the Indonesian rudjek, basically a salad, is added (for the Indian version most popular in Singapore) yu tiao, sort of a doughnut; ju her, a cuttlefish salad; taupok, which are tofu puffs; or pei tan, which are preserved duck eggs. What is usually not added is something--still unidentified--that has sickened over a hundred Singaporeans, may have caused a spontaneous miscarriage by a 38-year old pregnant woman and killed at least two people. Unfortunately, this is exactly what has happened at Sheik Allaudin Mohideen's stall at the Geyland Serai temporary market in Singapore.
When we think of Singapore, we think of clean. We also think of an amazing health care system, which costs one-third the per capita cost of U.S. healthcare.
So when food poisoning occurs in Singapore, you get a Singaporean response. Emergency rooms in three Singapore hospitals began filling overnight Friday with people vomiting who had all eaten food from the stall. Mr. Allaudin, whose stand has been in business for over 20 years, arrived at his stand at 8am Saturday morning to find health officials who shut the stand down. The remaining stands were inspected and found clean and allowed to open.
One possible cause: Vibrio parahaemolyticus. Its presence has been confirmed in two cases, but it has not been positively identified as the cause of the illnesses and deaths.
There is one lesson to be learned already, and it comes, unfortunately, from the sad story of the woman who miscarried, who was excited to be carrying a child by her new, second husband. She had had a yearning for rojak, and her husband had brought her some on Friday from her favorite stand. According to a report in Channel NewsAsia, "She noticed the Rojak smelled unusual [but] carried on eating it."
I suspect she won't do that again. And I imagine she wishes she had followed the basic advice not to eat food that smells off.
(The image is provided by the Creative Commons: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/)
