About one in 10 payments made by the federal government to healthcare providers caring for the poor and elderly are improper, a new report says.
Twelve percent of all payments made in the traditional Medicare fee-for-service program and nearly 10 percent of Medicaid payments were improper, according to an annual financial report by the Department of Health and Human Services posted online Monday.
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The report underscores ongoing concerns that there’s not enough oversight for the federal government’s two big health insurance programs. Last month, Comptroller General Gene Dodaro testified to Congress that Medicare and Medicaid are two of the top three government programs making improper payments.
Improper payments aren’t necessarily fraudulent, although some are. The category includes payments that lacked sufficient documentation, were for the wrong amount, were duplicative or made for non-eligible services.
Medicare fee-for-service, also known as traditional Medicare, made $43 billion in improper payments from June 2013 to June 2014, the report shows. The vast majority of those were overpayments rather than underpayments. Medicaid made $29 billion in improper payments during fiscal 2014.
