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Obama to Use Private 'Bounty Hunters' to Hunt Health Care Scammers

by Caleb Johnson on March 10, 2010 at 04:05 PM

In an effort to save money and gain support for health care reform, President Barack Obama is calling in the nerds. According to an Associated Press report, Obama said Tuesday that he's hiring a group of private "bounty hunters" to crack down on health care fraud, particularly those cases pertaining to Medicare and Medicaid. They won't be armed with mullets and pepper spray like TV badass Dog, but they will operate a computer program that scans bills for fraudulent claims or erroneous data! Fun! The AP reports that, in 2009 alone, Medicare and Medicaid paid about $59 billion to the wrong people.

Wednesday, Obama will sign a memorandum instructing cabinet secretaries and government agency members to ramp up the use of these geeky guns-for-hire. The private auditors will get to keep a portion of whatever funds they recover for the government, and that could amount to a hefty sum. The White House told the AP that a similar Medicare program in California, New York and Texas recovered about $900 million from 2005 to 2008. The White House expects this nationwide program to recover about $2 billion over the next three years. The health care system is clearly broken. The cleanup has to start somewhere, and being the nerds we are, some number crunching and data analysis seems like a solid place to begin. [From: AP/The New York Times]

Tags: barack obama, fraud, health, healthcare, medicare, president obama, scam, top, white house

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