HHS Study: Medicare Contractors Often Pay Claims Using Expired ID Numbers

Private contractors overseeing Medicare fraud paid claims submitted in the names of dead providers or for unnecessary medical claims, problems estimated to cost more than $1 billion in 2009, according to a report by the Associated Press.

Federal officials hire private contractors to process Medicare claims and investigate potential fraud. The HHS inspector general issued a report that examined how fraud contractors are tackling around $60 billion in annual Medicare fraud.

The report showed that contractors often paid claims using the identification numbers of dead providers. The contractors were asked to guess how much system vulnerabilities might cost, but only accounted for around 30 percent of the issues, which were estimated to cost $1.2 billion.

The report found that over three-quarters of the problems were still unsolved in 2011.

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