Doctors, hospitals, and other providers often bill dual eligible Medicare beneficiaries and Qualified Medicare Beneficiaries (“QMBs”) for services that should be covered under Medicare or Medicaid. This practice of improper billing is illegal and can cause low-income beneficiaries to go into debt, skip needed medical care, or end up without sufficient funds to pay for necessities like food and rent.
Justice in Aging has created several new resources that advocates can use to stop providers from billing their clients improperly. Today we’re releasing all of our improper billing resources together as a toolkit on our website. In the Improper Billing Toolkit, you'll find a new issue brief including a chart of improper billing regulations organized by state, several model provider letter templates, including California-specific letters, all of the trainings we have presented on the topic, as well as resources from CMS on improper billing.
Improper billing of QMBs has been a persistent problem across the country that Justice in Aging and other advocates have been working to stop. We’ve worked with CMS to improve its provider education efforts and internal processes, and provided advocates with previous trainings and resources. We’ve made progress but more remains to be done.
That’s why we created this robust toolkit for you to use to help your clients and to share broadly with other advocates.
