On the December 8, 2015 episode of Boomer Generation Radio, three representatives of Pennsylvania’s Senior Medicare Patrol (SMP) program discuss how they help Medicare beneficiaries to recognize and avoid Medicare fraud. SMPs provide education and advocacy to older adults and caregivers to prevent Medicare fraud using three key concepts: PROTECT, DETECT, REPORT.
In the second segment, Rabbi Address’ guest is Rabbi Stephen Roberts, president of Clergy for a Healthy America, and author of Professional Spiritual and Pastoral Care: A Practical Clergy and Chaplain’s Handbook.
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Rebecca Nurick, manages Pennsylvania’s SMP program for CARIE (Center for Advocacy for the Rights and Interests of the Elderly) in Philadelphia. She explains that health care fraud costs taxpayers $60-80 billion a year and lessens the quality of care people receive.
Diane Moskal, an SMP volunteer, hosts local meetings to raise awareness of Medicare scams and help Medicare beneficiaries avoid becoming victims of fraud. She says that SMP also takes reports of possible fraud to the U.S. Justice Department and the Office of the Inspector General.
Hal Bordy, SMP Volunteer Coordinator for northeastern Pennsylvania, trains SMP volunteers and
also help victims of scams or abuse get their cases resolved. SMP volunteers, he says, are mostly retired adults who take two days of intensive training to learn how to distinguish a Medicare error from abuse and fraud.
Every state has a federally funded SMP. To contact an SMP program, visit the national SMP Locator online.
Rabbi Roberts’ particular focus as a chaplain has always been pastoral/spiritual care, health issues, recovery/addictions, disaster response, education for chaplains and overall, developing the chaplaincy field professionally.
This focus led to the creation of Professional Spiritual and Pastoral Care: A Practical Clergy and Chaplain’s Handbook, the first comprehensive resource for spiritual and pastoral care. He is co-editor of Disaster Spiritual Care: Practical Clergy Responses to Community, Regional and National Tragedy (Both SkyLight Paths Publishing www.skylightpaths.com).
Chaplain Roberts is a longtime well-known leader in the field of professional chaplaincy. He is a past president of the NAJC and was instrumental in helping create the joint chaplaincy national standards. He guided the NAJC in the process of becoming a member of National Voluntary Organizations Active in Disasters (NVOAD) and served on NVOAD’s the Emotional and Spiritual Care Committee. He was part of NVOAD’s six-person writing group who created the Spiritual Care Consensus Standards which were approved by National VOAD as the basis of standards of care for disaster spiritual care.
His current focus as a chaplain is creating an education infrastructure to help professional chaplains excel as they learn new professional skills and concepts.
Boomer Generation Radio is sponsored in part by Kendal Corporation, a Quaker-based provider of continuing care retirement communities in the Northeast and Midwest, airs on WWDB-AM 860 every Tuesday at 10 a.m., and features news and conversation aimed at Baby Boomers and the issues facing them as members of what Rabbi Address calls “the club sandwich generation.” You can hear the show live on AM 860, or streamed live from the WWDB website.
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