CareSet Data Shows Billions in Medicare Fraud from Catheters
By Jinghong Chen
In the span of just three months, a single Denver medical supply company submitted more than $1.13 billion in Medicare claims for curved-tip catheters, products that consumers said they never ordered and never received.
That company is among those identified in a CareSet analysis of Medicare fee-for-service (FFS) Part B claims showing a dramatic surge in billing for HCPCS code A4352, a curved-tip catheter that Medicare covers when medically necessary. Nationwide, the total number of A4352 claims submitted under a durable medical equipment (DME) setting skyrocketed to over 693,000 in 2025, with a total billed amount exceeding $3.44 billion. The largest jump came between July and October.
At the center of that surge is Centennial Med Supply LLC, a Denver-based supplier, whose Medicare enrollment was revoked by the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), effective Oct. 24, 2025, for “abuse of billing privileges.” According to agency records, CMS also barred the company from re-enrolling in the Medicare program for 10 years.
Centennial submitted about 3,200 claims in June, but that number increased tenfold in July and peaked at more than 80,000 claims in October. From August through October 2025, the company submitted claims totaling more than $1.13 billion, accounting for 33.0% of all nationwide submitted amounts for A4352 for the full year, CareSet’s data shows.
Complaints began surfacing around the same time. On Oct. 27, the Better Business Bureau (BBB) issued a warning after receiving complaints from consumers who said they were billed for products they neither ordered nor received. The BBB also noted that Centennial had been sold in May/June 2025 and said it was unable to verify the company’s true ownership or operating location at the time.
A November investigation by The Denver Post found that two people were working at the company’s listed address, an office with just one desk. A representative responding to Centennial’s email said the company would look into any cases of improper billing if they received the patients’ information.
The supplier that submitted the second-largest billed amounts to Medicare for A4352 in 2025, Carebridge Innovations, is registered in Coral Springs, Florida.
Carebridge’s billing expanded rapidly over a matter of months. The company submitted claims for fewer than 11 beneficiaries in April 2025. By September, that number had surged to approximately 114,000 beneficiaries. The company submitted claims totaling more than $1.18 billion in 2025, accounting for 34.4% of all nationwide submitted amounts for A4352, CareSet’s data shows.
The supplier was revoked from the Medicare program by CMS effective Oct. 29, 2025, according to the agency.
A consumer alert issued by the BBB on Jan. 12, 2026, stated that Carebridge had not obtained a necessary license from Florida Agency for Healthcare Administration.
The BBB website also listed nine complaints filed against the company over the previous 12 months. Each involved consumers who said they were billed for urinary catheters they neither ordered nor received.
This abrupt spike is not unprecedented. In 2024, a The New York Times investigation reported that more than 450,000 Medicare beneficiaries were billed for urinary catheters in 2023, up from roughly 50,000 in previous years. The dramatic increase included $2 billion in catheter claims submitted by seven high-volume suppliers, citing an analysis by the National Association of Accountable Care Organizations.
In March 2024, House Republicans called on the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General and the CMS to investigate the alleged fraud. The following month, the OIG issued a consumer alert warning of urinary catheter scams and encouraged the public to report suspicious activity to the HHS-OIG Hotline.
A two-year investigation dubbed Operation Gold Rush, led by the U.S. Department of Justice, uncovered an alleged $10.6 billion fraud scheme in which conspirators acquired small medical supply companies and used the stolen identities of more than one million Americans to submit a flood of claims for urinary catheters and other durable medical equipment.
In June 2025, 11 defendants were indicted in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York on charges related to the urinary catheter fraud scheme.
Yet according to the latest HHS report, the improper payment rate for durable medical equipment, prosthetics, orthotics, and supplies (DMEPOS) rose to 24.1% in 2025, marking the first increase since 2020 and a 2.7 percentage point jump from the previous year.
Urological supplies stood out as one of the most problematic categories, with an improper payment rate of 74.1%, resulting in $885.8 million in improper payments in 2025 alone. In response, the DME MACs for Jurisdictions B and C announced in February this year that they will conduct widespread pre-payment reviews of urological supply claims submitted by new suppliers.