Antelope Valley Today

Congressman Mike Garcia’s (CA-27) Medicare and Medicaid Fraud Prevention Act (H.R. 8089) has passed out of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, advancing to a vote on the House floor.

“Simply put, we need to stop paying dead people,” said Rep. Garcia. “This bill does that by implementing common-sense safeguards to prevent fraudsters from exploiting deceased providers. Taxpayer dollars are precious, and right now we’re losing more than $100 billion every single year to this fraud and abuse in our healthcare system. There’s a lot of work to be done, but this bipartisan bill is an important step toward better protecting your healthcare. Millions of Californians rely on Medicare and Medicaid, and I’ll always fight to protect these critical programs and ensure these resources go to those who need it most.”

The Medicare and Medicaid programs jointly spend $1.6 trillion annually. Health and Human Services Inspector General Christi Grimm recently testified that her office receives hundreds of fraudulent claims per year – a level of fraudulent activity deemed unsustainable. Earlier this year, Comptroller General Gene Dodaro also testified that greater collaboration between CMS and states on provider screening can help prevent fraud.

The Medicare and Medicaid Fraud Prevention Act aims to enhance such collaboration by implementing a U.S. Government Accountability Office recommendation requiring states to check with the Social Security Administration Death Master File before automatically reenrolling Medicaid providers. This measure would enable states to deactivate the National Provider Identifiers (NPI) of deceased providers, thereby preventing bad actors from using those NPIs to defraud Medicaid or Medicare.