A bipartisan report by current and former members of the Senate Finance Committee outlines recommendations from more than 160 stakeholders in the health care community about ways to improve federal efforts to combat waste, fraud, and abuse in the Medicare and Medicaid programs.
The report, released January 31, offers recommendations such as increasing federal funding of state Medicaid antifraud activities; eliminating redundancy in federal and state Medicare and Medicaid antifraud programs; and changing certain Medicare payment policies that, through disparate pricing, lead to fraud, waste, and abuse. The stakeholders who contributed ideas for the report include physicians, suppliers, insurers, health systems, contractors from both the government and private sectors, health care trade associations, think tanks, and others.