Fed war on health care spending abuse needs to include Medicare Advantage
The Obama administration went to great lengths last week to inform us that it recovered $3.3 billion in fraudulent payments to Medicare health care providers in fiscal year 2014. Officials even went so far as to give an advance copy of their report to The Wall Street Journal, which, like the Center for Public Integrity, has been investigating Medicare fraud and abuse.
In a story that appeared in the Journal before the official release of the report, WSJ reporter Stephanie Armour wrote that the recovery “was part of an effort by the Obama administration to improve enforcement and prevent abusive billing practices.” That effort is run jointly by the Department of Health and Human Services the Justice Department.
HHS secretary Sylvia Burwell was quoted in the story as saying that “we’ve cracked down on tens of thousands of health care providers suspected of Medicare fraud,” an effort she said is helping to extend the life of the Medicare Trust Fund.
That’s good news, of course. Taxpayers benefit when doctors and other health care providers get caught trying to rip off the government.
But when it comes taking on big and well-connected insurance companies that have been ripping off the Medicare program for years, the administration has been far less aggressive in catching, much less punishing, the abusers.
As the Center for Public Integrity reported last week, officials in the Obama administration were advised as long ago as 2009 that a formula the government uses to pay private insurers that participate in the Medicare Advantage program “triggered widespread billing errors and overcharges” that waste billions of tax dollars every year.
There was no press release issued by the administration about that 2009 report; in fact, the administration buried it. The report probably never would have surfaced at all had the Center for Public Integrity not filed a Freedom of Information request seeking records going back several years regarding payments to Medicare Advantage plans.
There’s more to this story. Click here to read the rest at the Center for Public Integrity.
This story is part of Wendell Potter commentary. Former CIGNA executive-turned-whistleblower Wendell Potter writes about the health care industry and the ongoing battle for health reform. Click here to read more stories in this blog.
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Copyright 2014 The Center for Public Integrity. This story was published by The Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit, nonpartisan investigative news organization in Washington, D.C.
