Beverly Hills

Beverly Hills, California — ZIP code 90210 — is synonymous with wealth, luxury, and plastic surgery. It's probably not where you'd expect to find some of Medicare's highest-billing providers. But our analysis of the top 1,000 Medicare providers reveals 3 Beverly Hills entries billing a combined $120.6M — an average of $40.2M per provider. The national average? Just $79.7K.

The Beverly Hills Providers

Among Medicare's top 1,000 billing entities, these Beverly Hills providers stand out:

The Plastic Surgery Pipeline

Beverly Hills is the plastic surgery capital of America. But plastic surgeons in Beverly Hills aren't just billing Medicare for cosmetic procedures (which Medicare doesn't cover). They're billing for wound care.

The connection isn't as strange as it sounds. Plastic surgeons are trained in wound management and tissue reconstruction. Medicare covers wound care for diabetic ulcers, surgical complications, and chronic wounds. But the markup opportunities in wound care are enormous — and Beverly Hills providers have found them.

Why Beverly Hills?

The Beverly Hills anomaly seems counterintuitive: why would one of America's wealthiest ZIP codes be a Medicare billing hotspot? Several factors converge:

• High concentration of specialists — Beverly Hills attracts top-tier surgeons and specialists. These providers have the training and credentials to bill high-reimbursement procedures.
• Medicare-eligible elderly population — despite the wealth, Beverly Hills has a significant elderly population on Medicare. The 90210 ZIP code skews older than you'd think.
• Ambulatory surgery centers — Beverly Hills has a high density of ASCs that bill Medicare for outpatient surgical procedures at facility rates.
• Wound care opportunity — the convergence of plastic surgery expertise and lucrative wound care billing creates a natural (if eyebrow-raising) business model.

The Luxury ZIP Code Effect

Beverly Hills isn't the only wealthy ZIP code with outsized Medicare billing. Across the country, luxury ZIP codes show up repeatedly in high-billing provider analyses:

The pattern is consistent: wealthy areas attract specialists who command high reimbursement rates, while also serving elderly populations with comprehensive Medicare coverage. Add in the higher cost of living (which Medicare's geographic adjustment factors partially account for) and you get per-provider billing rates that dwarf the national average.

Beverly Hills vs the National Average

To put Beverly Hills billing in perspective: the national average Medicare payment per provider in 2023 was $79.7K. The Beverly Hills providers in our top 1,000 average $40.2M — roughly 504x the national rate.

Even accounting for specialty differences and geographic adjustments, this concentration of high-billing providers in a single wealthy ZIP code warrants scrutiny. Not because high billing is inherently fraudulent — but because the incentive structures in these luxury markets can create opportunities for abuse.

The Florida Connection

If Beverly Hills is a Medicare billing anomaly, South Florida is a Medicare billing universe. Miami-Dade County has long been known as the Medicare fraud capital of America, with the DOJ's Medicare Fraud Strike Force maintaining a permanent presence there since 2007.

The similarities between Beverly Hills and South Florida Medicare hotspots are striking: elderly populations, high specialist density, ambulatory surgery centers, and a culture of aggressive billing. The difference is scale — South Florida's Medicare market is orders of magnitude larger than Beverly Hills.

What to Watch

Beverly Hills represents a broader trend in Medicare: the geographic concentration of billing in areas where specialist density, elderly populations, and high-reimbursement procedures converge. As CMS increases its use of data analytics for fraud detection, these geographic patterns will likely receive more scrutiny.

The question isn't whether Beverly Hills providers are billing a lot — they are. The question is whether the volume of high-reimbursement procedures (particularly wound care) in one of America's wealthiest ZIP codes reflects genuine medical need or opportunistic billing.