Medicare Paid $47 Billion in Suspect Claims Last Year
by PubliusFrom the Associated Press:
The government paid more than $47 billion in questionable Medicare claims including medical treatment showing little relation to a patient’s condition, wasting taxpayer dollars at a rate nearly three times the previous year.
Excerpts of a new federal report, obtained by The Associated Press, show a dramatic increase in improper payments in the $440 billion Medicare program that has been cited by government auditors as a high risk for fraud and waste for 20 years.
It’s not clear whether Medicare fraud is actually worsening. Much of the increase in the last year is attributed to a change in the Health and Human Services Department’s methodology that imposes stricter documentation requirements and includes more improper payments — part of a data-collection effort being ordered government-wide by President Barack Obama this coming week to promote “honest budgeting” and accurate statistics.
Still, the fiscal 2009 financial report — covering the first few months of the Obama administration — highlights the challenges ahead for a government that is seeking in part to pay for its proposed health care overhaul by cracking down on Medicare fraud. While noting that several new anti-fraud efforts were beginning, the government report makes clear that “aggressive actions” to date aimed at reducing improper payments had yielded little improvement.
In recent years, the suspect claims have included Medicare prescriptions from doctors who were dead, and requests for payment for medical supplies such as blood glucose strips for sexual impotence and diabetic shoes for leg amputees. Patients, many of them new citizens who barely speak English, are sometimes recruited by brokers who go door-to-door offering hundreds of dollars for use of their Medicare numbers.
Obama is expected to announce new initiatives this coming week to help crack down on Medicare fraud, including a government-wide Web site aimed at providing a fuller account of health care spending and improper payments made by various agencies. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services also will launch a Web interactive next month that will allow users to track Medicare payment information by categories such as state, diagnosis and hospital.
Read the whole article here.
According to the article, the government’s goal is to get Medicare fraud down to 9.5% of the program’s total costs. Well. No doubt things will be better when government takes over all of health care.
Email this to a friend | Print |
Share on Facebook
| Tweet this
| 
Follow Us on Twitter
Subscribe via RSS
Got a Tip?
27 Comments
According to President Stick its not the govt. burreaucracy thats to blame for the debacle of Medicare its the real "doctors" involved who cut off feet and legs when they dont really need to, and the tonsils they do surgery on instead of just treating an allergy. These type of doctors prosper because of the burreaucratic corruption of a govt. program. Obowma is an idiot!
"Obama is expected to announce new initiatives this coming week to help crack down on Medicare fraud, including a government-wide Web site aimed at providing a fuller account of health care spending and improper payments made by various agencies."
I'll be waiting for the caveat or perhaps the transparency of a moonless night in Death Valley. Ahhhh. I love the smell of cynicism in the morning.
They (government) knew about this fraud and still did nothing???
make sure you ask your conegressmen about thsi when they come home for the holiday break.. I’d sure love to see the videos of them not knowign what to sya about this ???
Come on it would be great !!!!
Oh goodie another government-wide Web site, the one they set up to track waste in the stimulous money really seems to be working good, this medicare one is gonna be great!
I see they have a picture of Obamacare wrapped around that tree.
yea boyz, this medicare waste b happin all round, organizd crimnals b takin what thez wantz any timz thez wantz….easy munez…tax free
LOL — President Stick.
I'm glad to see you're continuing with this. Very funny stuff (but on the money, factually, as well)!
For Obama to investigate and curtail Medicare/Medicaid fraud is akin to Jethro Bodine quantifying and resolving adult literacy issues.
People much like Obama are the ones who placed these fat, tempting targets in front of the crooks.
I am on Humana Medicare Advantage – great program by the way. The only way I found it was through USAA – all I had found were the various A-J Supplement packages.
I expect that Humana does a better job of controlling fraud and is very cautious about the oxygen providers and wheel chair and scooter providers advertising on tv.
Colin G.
The Obama Administration has a vested interest in showing huge amounts of waste, fraud & abuse in Medicare, to support their contention that half of thier new plan can be funded from the savings created by fixing these problems. So how does the annual amount go from $17 billion in 2008 to $47 billion in 2009?
"In 2009 Government officials reclassified a Medicare payment improper if the medical documentation was incomplete or a doctor's signature was illegible".
HELLO, how many doctors' signatures can YOU read?!!
The fraud & abuse mentioned here is not in Medicare, it's with the new Administration and their "magic" accounting .
Well, at least we know that 9.5% fraud is acceptable.
Has anyone ever heard Any argument that would explain why no one instigated a program at the beginning of the year (or at least the beginning of the Health Care debate, which is about the same time) to End this type of fraud, and USE those dollars to fund a new health care plan?
This is what I can't grasp – they keep talking about waste, fraud and abuse but no one has made any moves to recapture that money? Both parties have talked endlessly about how they're going to use the "savings' from fraud to help fund their plan, but in 10 months no one has a single dollar to show that they can actually do it?
seems it would have made sense to have 50 billion in your pocket to shore up your argument along the way – guess that's just the old Common Sense plan getting in the way again -
Does that mean that any group that's moved to electronic records is lumped in? I don't believe there's any signature involved once it's online…which means anyone can hack in and generate the 'signature'
oh goodie – another web site! Think it will be as totally (non) transparent as Recovery.gov?
And how much $$$ is this site going to cost the taxpayer? We have 12-year old kids out here building websites that could match the govt. sites in terms of navigation and content…and I'll bet they'd launch one for less than these are costing us -
haha – I wrote my reply before reading yours…talk about Like Minds!
Who's responsible for the fraudulent claims? Private health care providers.
they say they will now clamp down on fraud, what has taken them so long? why not scrap the reform bill, and just cut out all spending not allowed under the constitution? that will save untold billions of dollars. and when is "our", i say that loosely, president, going to stop bowing to kings, and emperors?
These are the same government incompetents who sent out 10,000 social security checks to dead people.
Has anyone done research to see if fraud and abuse is parallel to the size of the government program? If so…can you imagine the amount of fraud and abuse that will be rampant with Obama/Pelosi Care? The larger a program is the harder it is to control.
The full article states an assumed 12.4 percent rate, giving $47 billion "…in improper payments when counting both Medicare fee for service and managed care…." Reverse the math and that is $379 billion of Medicare programs. What is the other $61 billion of the stated $440 billion Medicare budget? From the $440 billion you "only" get a 10.7 percent rate. Moreover the 2.9 percent savings, from 12.4 to 9.5, should be $11 billion from the $379 billion figure, yet $9.7 billion is stated as the savings, which gives a $334 billion starting point. Is that within rounding-error range, or is it going to take $1.4 billion in new (unionized!) government employees and office work to recover the $11 billion?
One thing seems certain though, it is in the best interest of Barry's administration to release horrible numbers, likely inflated ones. Why? First thing, well there is another mess they inherited from the previous administration! Two, it is easier to proclaim dramatic improvements when starting with artificially bad numbers to begin with. And three, the "waste and fraud" reclaimed from Medicare is supposed to be a major funder of health care reform. The more they say they find, the more that is available for funding.
Although comparing the stated $9.7 billion savings to the stated $400 billion or more savings over ten years that was to go towards reform, you have to wonder how much of those "improper claims" were frivolous items like providing quality-of-life improvements and extending the lives of the terminally ill. Which is going to be one of the major areas where they will root out the rampant "waste and fraud," to start.
Obama will have to find UNIONIZED workers to make his web site… just sayin…
Best way to recoup the savings… CANCEL MEDICARE/MEDICAID altogether (along with all the other gov handouts), or at least stop all NEW applications to the programs! Let private companies do their job.
Isn't the growing gov great?
Hey, there's Billions in waste over here… But I'm just going to stand here and point at it while not doing anything about it. Instead, I'm going to bend everyone over and take MORE!
Add this to the list of reasons to mock anyone who thinks the government can run things any better.
What is the credit card fraud rate? What is the fraud rate with private medical insurance?
If you lobby the right people on the hill you can do anything to the American public and no one in power will care. I wonder how much of this fraud went to pay for canmpiagn bribes for politians. Thuis is where the high cost of health insurance is being made. This where Obama should be concentrating and cleaning up the mess, starting with the people who run medicare and medicaid starting with the politains charged with overseeingt eh whole mess! Wake up America! There are only two reasons this is happening. Laziness by regulators which is criminal and they should all be fired or because some of the money illegally taken is coming back to the people in charge of its oversight. That's it! Wake Up and demand that congress fix the old problems before they allow for any changes to our health care system. Remeber it's not about health care but about giving the politains and the criminals suporting them more power over your life and your childrens future.
The Obama administration cracks me up, every problem that comes up they must huddle together and be like "step 1…set up a web site…" web sites will save the world! terrorism…website…gitmo…website…deficit…website… now lets go play basketball