Medicare Doles Out $45B in Improper Payments

It’s not news that the federal government has a serious issue with improper payments. During each of the last five years, agencies have doled out more than $100 billion in erroneous payments from various major benefit programs. Even knowing this, the problem only seems to be getting worse.

The latest program to be flagged by federal auditors is Medicare’s Fee for Service –which has seen a steady uptick of improper payments over the last five years.

This year, the program’s error rate jumped to 12.7 percent, from 10.1 percent last year, according to a new report from the Department of Health and Human Services Inspector General.

The auditors said that this year alone, Medicare’s Fee for Service program made about $45 billion in improper payments. That’s up significantly from $28.8 billion in 2011, when the error rate was 8.6 percent.

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