Need to report a scam? U.S. Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri says use her website to do so. During a stop in Springfield Wednesday, she announced the launch of the new fraud reporting tool, which comes after her recent appointment as chair of the Senate Subcommittee on Consumer Protection.
Last week, the Senator held a hearing on financial and contracting oversight related to aggressive medical equipment sales calls.
“It exposed billions of dollars being wasted when companies try to take advantage of seniors and pressure doctors to have the federal government pay for equipment that’s not needed,” McCaskill says.
The investigation was spurred when McCaskill was contacted by a Missouri doctor, which is why she’s asking other citizens to bring these types of issues to her attention.
“My staff will go through all the submissions, see if we can find any common threads. Particularly, if we see there are 20 or 30 people are saying ‘I was victimized by the same thing,’ then we’ll investigated it,” McCaskill said. “See what it is, see if in fact it is fraudulent, and then we’ll have a hearing about it and expose the fact that the federal agency that should have gotten to the bottom of this was asleep at the wheel.”
She adds that the biggest part of the nation’s debt comes from health care, and cleaning up the fraud within the Medicare program alone will “allow our country to be in good fiscal shape for our kids and our grandkids.”
McCaskill also weighed in on payday lending, noting that regulations are enacted on the state level. She did say that the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau is exploring disclosure laws, but added that most problems are best fixed at the state level, and hopes to put “pressure on Jefferson City to do the right thing.”
