I am writing today to announce the closure of the New Mexico Independent. After three and a half years of operation in New Mexico, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news…
While environmental activists played their part yesterday during demonstrations at the capitol building, going so far as to dress up as solar panels and to sing the tune of “You Are My Sunshine,” their counterparts, the anti-cap-and-trade contingency who has…
Roughly one quarter of University of New Mexico students are unimpressed with the state’s flagship public school, according to a survey that questioned college students about their higher education experiences.
The identity of an elderly New Yorker, June Smith, was used for fraudulent Medicare claims in New Mexico, Florida, California and Arizona, the New York Daily News reported Tuesday.
Several of the exams and tests for which the government was billed defied common sense. Smith, a 72-year-old woman, supposedly received up to $50,000 worth of exams, including a pregnancy test, semen analysis and prostate cancer tests.
Medicaid and Medicare fraud robs the federal health care system of billions of dollars each year, according to the FBI and U.S. Government Accountability Office — making it one of the nation’s most profitable crimes.
Nobody is sure exactly how much is stolen; the FBI estimates that up to 10 percent of all medical spending in the U.S. is fraudulent, making it an appealing target of potential savings.
But GAO investigators concluded in 2006 that curbing fraud was not a priority under the Bush administration. Instead, the administration cut off Medicaid cancer chemotherapy reimbursements for illegal — and recent documented, or legal — immigrants.
Citing an estimated $54 billion worth of improper payments last year, Obama administration announced in March an anti-fraud push for Medicaid and Medicare that it hopes will recoup more than $2 billion over the next three years.
