BALTIMORE – Medicare’s war on fraud is going high-tech with the opening of a $3.6 million command center that features a giant screen and the latest computer and communications gear. That’s raising expectations, as well as some misgivings.
The new facility went live a week ago in a nondescript commercial office park on Baltimore’s outskirts. A couple dozen computer workstations face a giant screen that can display data and photos, and also enable face-to-face communication with investigators around the country.
Medicare fraud is estimated to cost more than $60 billion annually, and for years the government has been losing a game of “pay and chase,” trying to recoup losses after scam artists have already cashed in.
Fraud czar Peter Budetti told reporters on a tour this week that the command center could be a turning point. Imagine a kind of NCIS-Medicare, except Budetti says it’s not make-believe.
“This is not an ivory-tower exercise,” Budetti said. “It is very much a real-world one.”
But two Republican senators say they already smell boondoggle.
Utah’s Orrin Hatch and Oklahoma’s Tom Coburn say Medicare’s new computerized fraud detection system, a $77 million investment that went into operation last year, is not working all that well.
In a letter to HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, they questioned spending millions more on a command center, at least until the bugs get worked out.
Hatch and Coburn say insiders are telling them the screen alone cost several hundred thousand dollars.
“This seems to be a case of misplaced priorities,” the senators wrote to Sebelius.
The two Republicans may have more than congressional oversight in mind. In an election year, Medicare fraud is an issue with older voters because it speaks to the Obama administration’s stewardship of the program.
Responded Budetti: “Our expectation is that this center will pay for itself many times over.”
Conducting what amounted to her first formal inspection on Tuesday, HHS Secretary Sebelius set the bar high for the command center, nothing less than the end of “pay and chase.”
“Preventing fraud and abuse is what this effort is about,” she said.
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