Budget cuts force scale back of health-care fraud investigations

Source: Washington Post

Facing major budget and staff cuts, federal officials are scaling back several high-profile health-care fraud and abuse investigations, including an audit of the state insurance exchanges that are set to open later this year as a key provision of the Affordable Care Act.

The Department of Health and Human Services’s Office of Inspector General, which investigates Medicare and Medicaid waste, fraud and abuse, is in the process of losing a total of 400 staffers, about 20 percent of its workforce from its peak strength of 1,800 last year. About 200 of those staffers will have departed by the end of this year, and the other 200 are slated to be gone by the end of 2015.

“As OIG’s budget resources decline, so do our enforcement and oversight activities,” reads an agency document obtained by the Center for Public Integrity. The OIG noted that it “will not be able to keep pace” with the rapid growth of taxpayer-subsidized health care anticipated under the Affordable Care Act, the signature health reform effort of the Obama administration.

Several of the canceled projects were included in the agency’s 2013 “work plan,” which serves as a barometer for suspected fraud or billing abuse.

Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/budget-cuts-force-scale-back-of-health-care-fraud-investigations/2013/07/25/888fee8e-f536-11e2-9434-60440856fadf_singlePage.html