Home Health & Hospice Week

• If your Medicare contractor identified an overpayment that the Medicare program paid you and you didn't pay it back, don't think they've forgotten about it.

A new HHS Office of Inspector General report indicates that CMS Program Safeguard Contractors (PSCs) identified 4,239 overpayments in 2007 that resulted in $835 million paid inappropriately during that period. However, claims processors had collected only $55 million as of June 2008 -- which was just 7 percent of the total owed back to contractors.

"CMS should determine what happened to the 1,060 overpayments that PSCs referred to claims processors in 2007, for which claims processors could not provide any collection information," the OIG report advises.

Collection rates for DME overpayments in South Florida were even worse, a separate OIG report found. Contractors collected only 1 percent of PSC-referred DME overpayments in the area and only 3 percent of DME overpayments nationally.

More than one-quarter of the overpayments totaled $1 million or more, the OIG found. Only one of the 315 suppliers identified by PSCs was still active when the OIG conducted the report. "The fact that these suppliers are no longer billing the Medicare program makes overpayment collection difficult," the OIG says.

The OIG reports are at www.oig.hhs.gov/oei/reports/oei-03-08-00030.pdf and www.oig.hhs.gov/oei/reports/oei-03-09-00570.pdf.