The HHS Office of Inspector General’s latest semiannual report is playing the agency’s greatest hits when it comes to hospice fraud, just in time for lawmakers to consider when entertaining funding sources for averting the "fiscal cliff" and implementing a "doc fix" for physician payment rates.
The report reviews Medicare exclusions and multi-million-dollar settlements in fraud cases against Hospice Care of Kansas for basing pay on admissions and census (see Eli’s Hospice Insider, Vol. 5, No. 8), and Hospice Family Care Inc. in Phoenix for General Inpatient (GIP) upcoding (see Eli’s Hospice Insider, Vol. 5, No. 7).
The government will recover nearly $7 billion from audits and investigations in the second half of fiscal year 2012, the OIG says in a release. The OIG also excluded 3,131 individuals and entities from participation in Federal health care programs in FY 2012, and reported 778 criminal actions and 367 civil actions, the watchdog agency adds.
The report is at http://go.usa.gov/g2bT.