Home Health & Hospice Week

In 2009, the Senior Medicare Patrol Project collected triple its 2008 amount. The government recruits different types of people to check for Medicare fraud, and some of those people giving you a close look may surprise you. Some fraud-fighters might be your very own Medicare patients, who are eligible to join the Senior Medicare Patrol (SMP), a group of more than 4,400 volunteers who are trained to detect fraud, waste, and abuse in the Medicare system. Last year, the government brought in $76,176 that it attributed to the SMP, which was a more than three-fold increase over the 2008 recoveries of $21,068. The SMP achieved the higher recovery last year despite having 200 fewer volunteers in 2009 than it had in 2008. The increase in recoveries may have been thanks to an increase in the number of group education and one-on-one counseling sessions that the SMP offered in 2009. The [...]