Who Pays Out $42 Billion in Overpayments?

It was a shock to see the number of overpayments in one year of Medicare.  An article in the Wall Street Journal [ Report Cites Shortfalls in Medicare’s Screening Process for Doctors, July 22 ] says CMS admits to overpaying for services by at least that amount.  The GAO report the article cites says  22% of the addresses where these amounts are paid to are "potentially ineligible" and some of them were drop boxes where people rent an address.  Congressional hearings actually allowed CMS to try to explain how they could have done such a thing, but the answers are not very revealing.  Cite a specific and CMS will tell you why that example wasn't the best one, without revealing which ones were the best.

Government involvement in healthcare has turned out to be expensive for the taxpayers.  Nowhere else in any service could we say overpayments of this amount of money were just slight oversights, but that is what CMS is trying to say.  These are the same people who brought you the Website rollout that was mismanaged from beginning to end.  There will be enough fraud in that part alone to justify investigations for as long as the Republicans hold the leadership of the Committees.

There is no excuse for an error rate of 22% in any database, regardless of circumstance or justification.  There is no excuse for overpayment of 42 Billion dollars, some to those addresses.  Can you imagine a business overpaying by amounts like this?   Dennis F. Poindexter books at Amazon