Insurers Overcharged Medicare for Prescriptions, Report Finds

By David Goldstein | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — If you buy medicine through Medicare’s prescription drug program, you could be paying too much.

The taxpayers who finance Medicare aren’t doing too well, either.

Insurance companies involved in the Medicare prescription drug benefit have overcharged subscribers and taxpayers by several billion dollars, according to the inspector general for the Department of Health and Human Services. Eighty percent of the participating insurance companies owe the program an estimated $4.4 billion for 2006 alone.

Medicare, however, has been slow to do something about it. In fact, the agency doesn’t even know how much money the insurance companies owe taxpayers because it hasn’t begun most of the financial audits needed to determine that.

“It shows a mindset that could care less about wasting taxpayer money, that has no problem with padding profits of drug companies with hard-earned taxpayer dollars,” said Sen. Claire McCaskill, a Missouri Democrat …

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