Medicare fraudsters shift targets a la "whack-a-mole"

The Economist: In an effort to staunch the flow of up to $60 billion a year to Medicare fraudsters, federal officials are launching a series of new safeguards that target program areas favored by the con artists. "The Department of Health and Human Services is setting up data systems to monitor payments. A telephone-monitoring programme, with voice-recognition, will verify that health-care workers really are making home visits. Since much of the fraud is conducted from fake addresses—empty shops, or in one case a broom cupboard—physical inspections are also being carried out. But the criminals have proved hard to deter. As they switch from one health programme to another, so they stay one step ahead of the law, in what the chief federal prosecutor in Miami, Wifredo Ferrer, has described as a frustrating game of 'whack-a-mole'" (8/12).

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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.