From NPR —
Health insurers that treat millions of seniors have overcharged Medicare by nearly $30 billion over the past three years alone, but federal officials say they are moving ahead with long-delayed plans to recoup at least part of the money.
Officials have known for years that some Medicare Advantage plans overbill the government by exaggerating how sick their patients are or by charging Medicare for treating serious medical conditions they cannot prove their patients have.
Getting refunds from the health plans has proved daunting, however. Officials with the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services repeatedly have postponed or backed off efforts to crack down on billing abuses and mistakes by the increasingly popular Medicare Advantage health plans offered by private health insurers under contract with Medicare. Today, such plans treat more than 22 million seniors — more than 1 in 3 people on Medicare.
Now CMS is trying again, proposing a series of enhanced audits tailored to claw back $1 billion in Medicare Advantage overpayments by 2020 — just a tenth of what it estimates the plans overcharge the government in a given year.
At the same time, the Department of Health and Human Services Inspector General’s Office has launched a separate nationwide round of Medicare Advantage audits.
As in past years, such scrutiny faces an onslaught of criticism from the insurance industry, which argues the CMS audits especially are technically unsound and unfair and could jeopardize medical services for seniors.
America’s Health Insurance Plans, an industry trade group, blasted the CMS audit design when details emerged last fall, calling it “fatally flawed.”
Insurer Cigna Corp. warned in a May financial filing: “If adopted in its current form, [the audits] could have a detrimental impact” on all Medicare Advantage plans and “affect the ability of plans to deliver high quality care.”
But former Sen. Claire McCaskill, a Missouri Democrat who now works as a political analyst, says officials must move past powerful lobbying efforts. The officials must hold health insurers accountable, McCaskill says, and demand refunds for “inappropriate” billings.
“There are a lot of things that could cause Medicare to go broke,” she says. “This would be one of the contributing factors; $10 billion a year is real money.”
…