The Washington Post reports that over the past eight years, medical supply companies have billed the government Medicare program for as much as $92 million that based upon prescriptions that were written by doctors who were no longer alive. And the government paid the bills. To add insult to injury, the department of Health and Human Services (which runs Medicare) knew about this problem for at least the past seven years, because their own inspector general reported on it back in 2001. This shows how easy it has become to defraud the federal government (and thus to defraud all of us taxpayers), and how widespread criminal conduct is within business sectors that derive their income from the government.
