Follow-Up on the Health Care Financing Administration's Successful Resolution of Patient Transfers

A prior project reported on improperly paid patient transfers under the Medicare program and recommended that the Health Care Financing Administration (HCFA) take action to resolve the improper payments. This follow-up review was made to access the adequacy of HCFA's follow-up actions. This final report points out that of the 13,771 unresolved transfers originally reported, HCFA has taken sufficient actions to resolve 13,216. As a result more than $8.4 million has been recovered for the Medicare Part A Trust Fund. As regards the remaining 555 transfers our analysis indicates it would not be cost effective to continue to pursue these cases. Therefore, we have recommended that HCFA consider its actions on the unresolved transfers from our initial report as completed.