Also breaking records is the amount that has been recovered, which has totaled $4.2 billion.
The Department of Justice and the Department of Health and Human Services have announced that they have broken previous records in healthcare fraud recovery in their joint efforts to address the issue last year.
This brought back $4.2 billion that would otherwise have scammed the systems and caused prices to rise.
Attorney General Eric Holder and Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) Kathleen Sebelius jointly issued a report that demonstrated that for every dollar spent by the American government in order to investigate healthcare fraud and abuse over the span of the last three years, it was able to recover $7.90. This is the highest amount of recovery that it has been able to achieve in the entire sixteen year existence of the Health Care Fraud and Abuse (HCFAC) Program.
The departments are hoping that this is a sign that they are having a growing impact on overcoming healthcare fraud.
This may also reflects improved coordination among the various public agencies and departments. However, it could also be a sign that the instance of scams is also on the rise. According to the HHS and the Justice Department, it is a clear demonstration of the growing effectiveness of the prevention and enforcement efforts that the government has been making in this area.
The $4.2 billion that was recovered last year is a notable increase over the amount that was brought back in 2011, which was $4.1 billion. These funds were recovered from both individuals and companies that had been attempting to defraud the various federal programs that are geared toward taxpayers and seniors. This either stopped or recovered the payment of funds that these individuals and companies were not legitimately entitled to receive.
Over the last four years, there has been a total recovered $14.9 billion. The four year period before that recovered only $6.7 billion, which demonstrates a massive growth in the recovery totals. Since the creation of the HCFAC program in 1997, there has been a total of more than $23 billion that has been diverted from healthcare fraud and has been returned to the Medicare Trust Funds.
