Home Health & Hospice Week

• The Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Justice plan to build on their joint HEAT Task Force initiative to ferret out more health care fraud, according to the new Health Care Fraud and Abuse Control Program (HCFAC) Report, which is released annually.

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) gives HHS and other law enforcement officials the tools to combat fraud and abuse. The law "strengthens our ability to stop fraud before it starts by making it harder to submit false claims and easier to catch those who try to cheat out consumers," HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius says in a release. "And, the new law will guarantee that those who try to game the system face severe consequences."

CMS has a new Center for Program Integrity that will lead the fraud-fighting efforts, Sebelius noted.

"As long as health care fraud pays and goes unpunished, our health care system will remain under siege," Attorney General Eric Holder says in the release.

Anti-fraud efforts recouped $2.51 billion for Medicare in 2009, according to the HCFAC report. That's 29 percent more than in 2008.

The report is at www.justice.gov/dag/pubdoc/hcfacreport2009.pdf.