Officials not truly concerned about fighting fraud

Regarding More info on proper billing for diabetes test strips needed: OIG:

I was reading with great interest the article by Jessica Zigmond on fraud, and I have to say that HHS' Office of the Inspector General and all the rest of the agencies are interested in nothing but lip service.

We have developed a preventive monitoring system, and one of the key features we built into it is aimed at eliminating DME fraud. Yes, you can talk algorithms and all kinds of fancy and expensive solutions, but you will not be able to get away from the simple fact of greed. Once greed is there and you make fraud easy as our government does, you are faced with a problem. One of the major issues in respect to this is that the distribution system does not work. They may claim great success with the bidding program, but it's flawed. It is a known fact that the government hands out these contracts and then the contract holders make side deals with the ones who did not get it.

One of the major features in our system is diabetes monitoring. We also built into it a fraud-prevention system whereby the order of supplies is directly tied to the patient. It is quite obvious that a patient has no intent to steal a couple of dollars' worth of diabetic supplies, but when you are a distributor and work with tens of thousands, the story is quite different. It may surprise you that we reached out to almost every governmental entity and politician to discuss this with them, and the end result is lip service.

Conclusion: As long they have their cushy jobs and they can create these useless reports at the expense of the tax payers, who cares?

David Hold