No More Free Scooters for Fat Retired WalMart Shoppers

Remember those annoying Scooter Store commercials? Well the FBI raided the Scooter Store for medicaid fraud and now the company is bankrupt.

From ABC here:

The Scooter Store, which claims it has given 700,000 senior citizens back their mobility, has itself run aground. The company this week filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, listing assets of $1 million to $10 million and liabilities of between $50 million and $100 million.

Major creditors include the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), which, according to the filing, is looking to collect $19.5 million–the amount the Scooter Store previously had agreed to repay the U.S. government after an independent audit found that the company had overbilled Medicare and Medicaid by $46.8 million to $87.7 million from 2009 to 2011.

Last month agents of the FBI, the Office of the Inspector General, the U.S. Department of Health and the Texas Attorney General’s office raided the Scooter Store’s headquarters in New Bruanfels, Texas. Two weeks after that, Scooter’s CEO Martin Landon sent an email to employees telling them not to return to work until further notice.

The government audit found that seniors with no medical need for a power chair had nonetheless gotten one through the Scooter Store—an outcome due in part to the company’s skill at badgering doctors to prescribe its products.

The company, which according to bankruptcy filings, once had over 2,400 employees, now is gets by with just 300. It has stopped selling chairs and stopped running its once ubiquitous TV commercials promising seniors they could not be turned down for a “free” power chair, courtesy of government health coverage.

I’m happy to see a company that was looting taxpayers go right down the crapper. And with Obamacare coming, audits like this are going to become very frequent.