BrianGarst.com

For those who understands how government works, stories like this are no big surprise:

Erroneous and fraudulent Medicare payments for medical equipment could make up almost a third of the number of disbursements by the program, according to a draft report from the Health and Human Services Department’s inspector general.

…According to an executive summary of the draft report obtained by Congressional Quarterly, Medicare officials massively underestimated the payment error rate in the durable medical equipment program, or DME, which reimburses Medicare beneficiaries for items like wheelchairs and oxygen tanks.

The draft report summary says that in 2006, 31.5 percent of the payments made under the program were in error. That is much higher than the 7.5 percent error rate that the CMS had originally reported through its own fraud-finding Comprehensive Error Rate Testing program (CERT).

This kind of failure would be completely unacceptable in a free market. Government is a different story. Most likely this will be swept under the rug. If some pretense of corrective action is attempted, it will likely result in an even bigger and more incompetent government program.