Hunting Down Health-Care Fraud

Kaiser Health News offers a round-up of stories on the federal government's renewed effort to fight health care-fraud, specifically a request to prohibit guilty executives from any future work with Medicare.

And a piece in The Boston Globe describes how new models of "global" or "bundled" payments could be more vulnerable to fraud and abuse:

A federal official told Congress Wednesday that some of the new Medicare models for reimbursing doctors and hospitals, such as those using "bundled" payments or flat fees for specific conditions increase "the danger" that providers could "cheat patients and the government by skimping on care. … The Office of Inspector General is developing plans to scrutinize new models of care to block fraud opportunities, said [Lewis Morris, chief counsel for the Office of Inspector General in the Department of Health and Human Services]. The new health care overhaul law signed by President Obama this year, he added, gives OIG investigators better tools to scrutinize Medicare computer data in a hunt for fraud" (Rowland, 6/15).