Health care fraud is big business

Health care fraud has become a multi-billion dollar industry - up to $100 billion a year, according to estimates - for scammers and organized crime gangs, CNNMoney reports. In recent months health care identity theft has topped the list of crimes, a con in which criminals to tap real patient information to rack up fake charges. "Increasingly, criminal groups are hacking into digital medical records so that they can steal money from the $450 billion, 44-million-beneficiary Medicare system -- making the government" the top victim. That stolen information allows a perpetrator to falsely bill "Medicare and private insurers for drugs, equipment or treatment that were never prescribed" (Kavilanz, 1/13).

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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.