Every year the Government Accountability Office releases a list of “high risk” federal programs, the risk being “their vulnerabilities to fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement, or are most in need of transformation.” A total of thirty programs are on the 2013 list, which was released today.
They include Medicare and Medicaid, which combined made more than $63 billion in “improper payments.”
Here’s what the GAO had to say about Medicare:
In 2012, the Medicare program covered more than 49 million elderly and disabled beneficiaries at an estimated cost of $555 billion, and reported improper payments estimated to be more than $44 billion.
And here’s its summary of Medicaid:
In its 2012 financial report, HHS estimated—on the basis of individual state error rates from a sample of 17 states reviewed on an annual rotating basis—a national improper payment rate for Medicaid of 7.1 percent (with the federal share estimated at $19.2 billion).
