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Show Weekly gpecnatl ZZSZT" Audit finds 'profiteering' in health company transactions Washington Auditors for the federal Department of Health and Human Services have uncovered evidence of "profiteering" by the nation's largest provider of life-sustaining life-sustaining kidney dialysis treatment. The evidence was gathered after the firm, National Medical Care Inc., of Waltham, Mass., sought an exemption late last year from federal rules prohibiting sales practices that unnecessarily inflate the cost of health care, v The story is told in a still-secret report by the HHS inspector general. The auditors found that one of National Medical Care's subsidiaries, subsi-diaries, Erika Inc., sold dialysis supplies to another subsidiary, the Artificial Kidney Center of Queens, N.Y., at prices ranging from 22 percent to 56 percent above the going rate. As a result, according to the auditors, Erika made an excess profit of $181,671 on that 1977 deal alone. The IG report also found that during 1981, Erika netted 14.3 million in excess profits from sales to its subsidiaries. National Medical Care Vice President Timothy I. McFeeley, meanwhile, urged HHS not to release the information gathered by the inspector general. His concerns are easy to understand. For example: The company claimed that Erika charged National Medical Care's clinics an average of $21.93 less for dialysis machine filters than it charged unrelated clinics. The auditors disagreed. They found that clinics within the corporate family were charged anywhere from $38.08 to $83 more per filter. That led to an excess profit of $1.3 million. The company claimed its clinics paid only 84 cents more for blood-line sets from its Erika subsidiary. The auditors found that the markup averaged $8.46, for an excess profit of $271,693 on that item. In his letter to the IG, McFeeley called the audit "a colossal waste of tax money." Yet, if HHS had granted the exemption allowing the higher prices resulting from National Medical Care's deals with its subsidiaries, those prices would have affected the federally established establish-ed reimbursement rate for kidney dialysis treatments nationwide. KHOMEINI WATCH: The aging and ailing Iranian ruler, Ayatollah Khomeini, has silenced observers who had questioned his health by emerging for televised appearances looking hale and hearty. But intelligence officials have made sport of predicting Khomeini's health status, and here are some tidbits gleaned from their reports: Khomeini's heart specialist has made several visits to his famous patient in recent weeks. These visits have been relatively easy to track for the simple reason that the doctor must cancel all of his regular appointments when he is summoned to Khomeini's side. Several reports assert that Khomeini suffers from severe prostate problems, a condition not uncommon for an 84-year-old man. But the leader's personal physician has reportedly joked that Khomeini "could handle another wife," perhaps suggesting that the problem isn't as serious as reported. Under no illusions of immortality, immortal-ity, Khomeini recently penned a secret will. It was widely believed that the will contained the name of Khomeini's choice of a successor. Our sources believe that a high official sneaked a peak at the document and was disappointed. The will named no successor. COVERT AID: In what may be its first venture into covert military operations since preparations for the attack on Pearl Harbor 43 years ago, the Japanese government has taken a modest part in the guerrilla war against the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua. A high-ranking contra leader in the Honduran capital of Tegucigalpa told our reporter Jon Lee Anderson the details. The source is an intelligence agent for the Miskito Indian rebel force based in Honduras. Hon-duras. V - ' " ! He said that from February to June of this year six Japanese military instructors has been sent by their government to train commandos comman-dos for missions against the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua. The Japanese trained 100-special-ly selected Miskito warriors in guerrilla tactics. "They taught hand-to-hand combat, martial arts, and how to make booby traps," the source said. MISSING MAPS: Internal audits from the Defense Mapping Agency, the Pentagon arm charged with supplying aerial, land and ocean charts to the services, show the agency has been careless with, and even misplaced, sensitive war-reserve war-reserve maps. And as innocuous as it may sound, any commander will tell you just how hard it is to fight a battle without a map. In a spot check of eight Central American hot spots, the map agency was found deficient in all eight. One source reports that during the Grenada invasion, ground troops had to reply on aerial maps for three days before the correct charts came in. In another case during the invasion, Marines used 19th-century maps because it would have breached the security of the super-secret mission to radio for updated charts. |