August 30th, 2011

From the Pittsburgh-Tribune:

WASHINGTON — New government statistics show federal health care fraud prosecutions in the first eight months of 2011 are on pace to rise 85 percent over last year because of ramped-up enforcement efforts under the Obama administration.

The statistics, released by the non-partisan Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, show 903 prosecutions so far this year. That’s a 24 percent increase over the total for all of fiscal year 2010, when 731 people were prosecuted for health fraud through federal agencies across the country. Prosecutions have gone up 71 percent from five years ago, according to TRAC.

“This was a fairly dramatic number of prosecutions,” said David Burnham, co-director of TRAC. TRAC is a research organization at Syracuse University that submits Freedom of Information Act requests for government data, and then reports the results.

Justice Department officials said the increase runs parallel with what they’re noticing when looking at health care fraud broadly, in part because of a couple of big busts this year, as well as several cases involving fraud in the private sector.

“The trend certainly looks accurate and on track with our data,” said Justice spokeswoman Alisa Finelli, though she said she could not confirm the exact numbers. She cited a February case that brought in 111 people — the largest take-down to date for the Medicare Fraud Task Force — as a factor. In that case, doctors, nurses and executives were accused of falsely billing Medicare more than $225 million.

Task force convictions have also risen, according to Justice’s criminal division Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer. In 2010, the task force saw 23 trial convictions for Medicare fraud. In the first eight months of this year, they have had 24.

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