Last week, when the Department of Justice charged three people in Miami with fraud and other crimes in a $1 billion scheme to bilk Medicare, it was the single largest criminal case in the nine-year history of the Medicare Fraud Strike Force, a coalition of federal, state and local law enforcement agencies. A month earlier, a crackdown by the strike force led to civil and criminal charges against 301 people in dozens of schemes totaling $900 million in allegedly false billings.
Clearly, health care fraud is vast. Less obvious is that prevention, detection and punishment of fraud have improved in recent years, though that would be threatened if the Affordable Care Act of 2010 were weakened, as Republicans have long demanded.
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