Nearly a dozen Central Oregon seniors belong to the Senior Medicare Patrol — a team of volunteer investigators who serve as the country’s first line of defense when it comes to protecting the Medicare and Medicaid programs from fraud and waste.

Since the first patrol programs launched in 1996, they have trained millions of seniors how to recognize and report medical bills that seem questionable. They also helped Medicare and Medicaid programs recover more than $6.1 million last year and referred another $27.5 million in suspect claims to the proper authorities for further review and possible prosecution, according to a recent report from the U.S. Office of the Inspector General.

“When people don’t understand something in their Medicare billing, they need to get in touch with us,” said Steven Guzauskis, who supervises Central Oregon’s 10 patrol volunteers.

Guzauskis’ team of volunteers is part of Oregon’s statewide Senior Medicare Patrol team that last year personally met with 1,167 Medicare beneficiaries to discuss billing issues or concerns they had about their health insurance and health benefits.

“It could just be talking with someone about ways they can protect their medical identity, or it could be a billing problem or question,” said Ryan Kibby, a program analyst with the State Unit on Aging who runs the state’s Senior Medicare Patrol program.

Kibby said most of the people who come through his office are referred to the program through volunteers with the state’s Senior Health Insurance Benefits Assistance program, which helps people sign up for Medicare benefits during the program’s open enrollment period each year.

They also come to his office through the state’s Long-Term Care Ombudsman program, which assigns a volunteer ombudsman to represent the interests of nursing home residents, and through community outreach events patrol members put on, teach people about Medicare and how to detect fraud and abuse.

Guzauskis said most of the calls that come through his office deal with situations where a person living in a long-term care facility mistakenly gets billed for their prescription drugs plus another resident’s drugs when the facility processes its drugs at the end of the billing cycle.

Patrol members review the person’s bills after meeting with him or her, identify where the mistake was made and bring it to the long-term care facility’s attention so it can be corrected and any money that was improperly paid can be refunded.

“I’d like to think these billing problems are made by accident,” said Guzauskis. In these cases, he doesn’t suspect fraud, and so far has only dealt with a few cases where he hasn’t immediately been able to solve the problem. These cases are referred to Kibby’s office in Salem.

Kibby’s office has experienced a similar track record, according to the inspector general’s report. Out of the 3,186 inquiries that came through his office last year, he only had to refer seven of them to another agency for further investigation.

These seven cases had a total monetary value of only $3,013, according to the report.

But Kibby said the fact his office doesn’t confront a lot of fraud cases doesn’t mean its work isn’t valuable.

Outside of common billing questions, Kibby said one of the most common issues his office dealt with involved robo-dialing Medicare beneficiaries across the state as part of a scam.

The scammers said they were working with the Medicare program — or a firm that was taking over its claims-processing unit because of the government shutdown — and needed some information to update their records. They then asked for the person’s bank account numbers, which Kibby said is a request Medicare employees would never make and is a clear sign that someone is up to no good.

“Fortunately, most of the people who have been called recognized it (as a potential scam) and hung up the phone,” Kibby said, giving volunteers with the state’s Senior Medicare Patrol’s credit for this achievement because of the work they’ve put into education the community about Medicare.