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Date: Thursday, March 12, 1998 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Contact: HCFA Press Office(202)690-6145
"Fighting fraud and abuse is one of this Administration's highest priorities. We set records for convictions, collections and kicking bad providers out of our programs in 1997, but we can and we must do more," said HHS Secretary Donna E. Shalala, who will help kick off the conference.
Medicare alone saved more than $7.5 billion through anti-fraud and abuse efforts in fiscal 1997, and with its law enforcement partners returned another $1 billion to the Medicare Trust Fund. Efforts of the highly successful demonstration phase of Operation Restore Trust anti-fraud program identified $23 in money owed back to the Trust Fund for every $1 on fraud detection and recoveries. Lessons learned in that pilot project are now being applied nationwide.
"This conference will help us learn how to build on our successes and develop a plan for doing even more to protect consumers and taxpayers from health care scams and unscrupulous providers," said Nancy-Ann Min DeParle, administrator of the Health Care Financing Administration, which oversees the Medicare and Medicaid programs. "We must do this to make Medicare secure for our beneficiaries and for future generations."
The conference features a keynote address by Malcolm Sparrow, a Harvard University lecturer and author of the health care fraud book "License to Steal." Other confirmed speakers include Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa and Sen. Bob Graham of Florida.
"This is a working conference," said DeParle. "We need to keep working harder and smarter to catch criminals who try to stay one step ahead of every loophole we close and every scam we shut down."
The bulk of the conference will consist of discussion sessions. Groups of experts from private insurers, consumer advocates, health care provider groups, state health officials and law enforcement agencies have been invited to share successful techniques and explore new ideas. Their discussions will be synthesized and analyzed to determine effective strategies and practices already in place, and what new ideas deserve further exploration.
The conference is from 8:15 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. at the Gallaudet University Kellogg Conference Center at Florida Ave. and Sixth St. N.E. in Washington D.C. The conference is open to the press.