Government
Improper Medicare payments drop
NEWS IN BRIEF — Posted Dec. 3, 2007
The percentage of improper Medicare claims payments fell from 4.4% in 2006 to 3.9% in 2007, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services announced Nov. 16. That's down from 14.2% in 1996, when the agency first began tracking the figures. The improvement is due to continued efforts by CMS and its contractors to use detailed data analyses to target areas where erroneous claims processing, inaccurate billing and "provider error" result in waste, fraud or abuse, the agency said.
Over the past three years, error rate reductions have led to about $11 billion less in improper payments. CMS pays more than a billion fee-for-service claims each year.
Note: This item originally appeared at http://www.ama-assn.org/amednews/2007/12/03/gvbf1203.htm.
