PhillyInc

Put this under the header: Feds spend (probably) tens of thousands of dollars in staff hours to save a few thousand bucks. It goes like this: The Office of the Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has released an 11-page report about a Medicare claim by Penn State University's Milton S. Hershey Medical Center, located in Hershey, Pa. It found that the medical center had received a rebate of $34,136 from a vendor. The medical center put in a claim to Medicare for the bill. But it did not reduce the bill by a similar amount. In effect, it made $34,136 from tax-payers to which it was not entitled. Some might call that insurance fraud. Was there a bigger allegation of insurance fraud that the feds didn't find? They treat the claim like an accident and report: "We recommended that the provider (1) revise and resubmit its 2004 Medicare cost report, if not already settled, to properly reflect the $34,136 rebate as a credit reducing its health care costs and (2) consider performing a self-assessment of its internal controls to ensure that future vendor rebates are properly credited on its Medicare cost reports. The provider agreed with our recommendations." Well, when you go fishing, sometimes you get a big one. Most of the time you get small fry. - Thomas Ginsberg