Medical Scams Still Alive and Well

Do you buy your prescription medicine through your Medicare drug plan? If you do, you may be paying way too much. In fact, starting in 2005, Medicare started being audited for various payment and billing problems.

The problem is that we are now in 2009, the problems were supposed to have been mostly eradicated, but 84% of the companies who handle Medicare drug plane have overcharged Medicare recipients to the tune of several billion dollars collectively. If you are a taxpayer, you are paying a great deal of this money. To date, it is estimated that insurance companies owe the government/taxpayers about 4.4 billion dollars because of overcharges.

The problem is that Medicare is taking forever for them to figure out just how much the taxpayers are owed. They haven’t done the audit on the audit. Since 2006! They have said that this is a slow and tedious process. Maybe they should have had a different and better system and some controls and auditing in the first place.

Congress is now asking CMS why they are taking so long to perform the correct audits. They would also like to know why the companies that offer Medicare drug coverage have been overcharging their customers and unwitting taxpayers without any self-regulation or auditing.

Medicare is the federal health insurance program for people 65 and older. The optional prescription drug benefit, which subsidizes the costs of medicine for subscribers, was the subject of an intense political debate before Congress enacted the program in 2003.

The program’s nearly 27 million beneficiaries generally pay for the coverage, known as Medicare Part D, through a monthly premium that’s deducted from their Social Security checks. That and Medicare subsidies paid for by taxpayers pay for the $60 billion program.

CMS has contracts with private companies to issue Medicare drug coverage and there has been debate about this for years. Now Congress has told CMS that it must complete these audits, and sooner – rather than later – CMS must explain to Congress how it plans to collect the $4.4 billion that was overpaid.