Medicare fraud costs taxpayers big money

The Fiscal Times: Medicare Fraud: A $70 Billion Taxpayer Ripoff
Medicare could wrench as much as $70 billion a year in savings by cracking down on fraud, experts told Congress this week. But the key is preventing scam artists and fake firms from doing business with the senior citizen health care program in the first place — not chasing them down after the fact. ... Providers selling Medicare durable medical equipment like motorized wheelchairs and fraudulent billing by home health agencies are major abusers of the system, especially in areas with huge senior populations like south Florida, southern California and the New York-New Jersey metroplex (Goozner, 3/10).

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This article was reprinted from kaiserhealthnews.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.