Nationwide 'Medicare Fraud Strike Force' focuses on driving down cost

A "Medicare Fraud Strike Force," which started in south Florida, has now expanded across the country to indict more than 300 on fraudulent Medicare billing charges, The Washington Times reports. Officials say the strike force has broken up operations that attempted to defraud Medicare of more than $700 million. "Former U.S. Attorney R. Alexander Acosta, who put a priority on health care fraud cases when he was the government's chief prosecutor in Miami, said the decision in Washington to make such coordinated efforts permanent is starting to have an impact, but that more needs to be done to make a real dent in the kickback and false-billing schemes that plague the national health care program." Officials estimate that between 3 and 10 percent of Medicare and Medicaid spending is lost per year on waste, fraud and abuse (Neubauer and Seper, 12/1).

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This article was reprinted from khn.org with permission from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent news service, is a program of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health care policy research organization unaffiliated with Kaiser Permanente.