R.I.P., Diogee

Consuegra started with some of the hit singles from Giuliani's career: leadership on 9/11, law and order, "12 Commitments to America." Then he took questions.

Gene Bungy went straight to the gut: What about Giuliani's "don't ask, don't tell" position?

Consuegra cleared his throat. Ummm... he couldn't talk about that because he'd never talked to Giuliani about it.

Gay marriage, civil rights protections for gays, freedom of expression?

Sorry, guys, not on the table. But Consuegra did volunteer the opinion that Giuliani was the only candidate capable of beating Hillary Clinton, who threatens to "socialize everything under the sun."

Several guests asked about Giuliani's scandal-clouded personal life.

"Rudolph Giuliani isn't running as a perfect person," Consuegra said. "He's running as a human being." Somebody noted that, in the current arena of Republican debate, that sounded damned near like a ringing endorsement of gay rights. And so everybody went home happy.

At the Jubilee Center on Scott Street in Hollywood, organizers love the smell of ravioli in the morning. It smells like... victory.

Last month, Executive Director Tammy Morton faced the heroic task of filling an $8,500 hole in the center's budget. That would be a budgetary punch to the solar plexus.

Hollywood's Department of Finance had informed the agency that it would not be fulfilling the final two years of its contract with Jubilee Center, which provides food, clothing, and counseling to the region's homeless and working poor. The center depended on those funds to pay its rent and utility bills.

Was there a plan B?

"Do you see these hands?" Morton says. "I would have been writing grants."

That is, Morton would have been applying for grants from foundations. But the foundations, Morton says, have a way of asking an applying agency whether it has sought out their own city for funds. And as far as foundations are concerned, it's an ominous sign when the agency has been abandoned by its city.

The city blamed the state legislature for Jubilee's problems. Hollywood was getting socked with state cutbacks, leaving less for do-gooder programs like Jubilee, officials said. But then, you have to think that there were other forces at work here too. Let's be candid: Is there any room for Jubilee transients in the glossy condotopia that Mayor Mara Giulianti and her allies are creating in Hollywood?

In the end, Morton and her board of directors fought back. A letter-writing campaign combined with a trip to the Hollywood Commission finally did the trick. The city caved, renewing the $8,500 allocation. That would be for one more year, however, not the two years as spelled out in Jubilee's contract.

As other Hollywood residents have learned, it is not a city known for its generosity — unless you're developing an upscale condo. Next year? Tailpipe suggests that Morton keep those hands limber.

Now, here's some entertaining reading for a sleepless night: "Aberrant Billing in South Florida for Beneficiaries with HIV/AIDS," by that well-known literary whiz Health and Human Services' Office of the Inspector General (OIG).

But Tailpipe jests no more. In fact, the 40-page report includes a mystery that still has this battered cylinder scratching his rusty noggin: Of all the bills that Medicare/Medicaid received in 2005 for AIDS/HIV patients in the entire country, a whopping 72 percent came from Broward, Miami-Dade, and Palm Beach counties. Verrry strange — especially when you consider that only 8 percent of the nation's HIV/AIDS beneficiaries lived here in 2005. South Florida providers charged $2.5 billion to Medicare for HIV/AIDS treatments that year, which was more than twice the $978 million charged by the rest of the country combined.

What accounts for this disparity?

Apparently, it's driven by a money-making scheme that investigators now call the "infusion therapy scam." It goes like this: An average Joe applies for a Medicare provider number. There's no education requirement, and no medical background is needed, just a wallet big enough to carry away all the money you'll get. (Some of this is described in Deirdra Funcheon's New Times cover story "Rx for Plunder" from September 20).

Providers then open infusion clinics where AIDS patients ostensibly come to get medicine administered intravenously. The patient pays nothing for the service; Medicare pays the clinic directly. And the payments come fast and plentifully. Medicare pays automatically, direct-depositing funds into providers' accounts within 16 days. "Any criminal with a few hours on his hands can figure out what gets paid," says a health-care fraud expert with a law enforcement background, who declined to be named. Clinic owners naturally bill for services with the greatest profit margins. "You could be a multimillionaire in 30 days," the expert says.

By looking at billing patterns, the OIG saw instances where multiple clinics claimed to have given infusion treatments to the same patient on the same day. Sometimes, a clinic doled out cheap vitamins but billed for expensive drugs or a clinic billed for services on a day that it was supposedly closed. Sometimes patients got kickbacks for participating in one of the schemes (the going rate, inspectors say, is $150 a month, sometimes paid in gift cards for a grocery store). Often, there were no patients at all. Frequently, there wasn't even an actual physical clinic, the OIG says; though providers were required to have a brick-and-mortar space, inspectors would visit addresses only to find that providers were "phantom clinics" — rooms the size of broom closets with only a few chairs and a gumball machine.