Several Congressional committees have held hearings this month on health policy issues, including the following:
- A House Education and the Workforce Health Subcommittee hearing on “Barriers to Lower Health Care Costs for Workers and Employers.”
- A House Veterans’ Affairs Committee hearing entitled “Through the Looking Glass: Return to Pharmaceutical Prime Vendor Program.”
- House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee hearings on “Examining the Appropriateness of Standards for Medical Imaging and Radiation Therapy Technologists” and “Medicare Contractors’ Efforts to Fight Fraud – Moving Beyond ‘Pay and Chase.”
- A House Oversight Subcommittee on Government Organization hearing on “Assessing Medicare and Medicaid Program Integrity.”
- A Senate Aging Committee hearing on “Empowering Patients and Honoring Individual’s Choices: Lessons in Improving Care for Individuals with Advanced Illness.”
- A Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing on “Saving Taxpayer Dollars by Curbing Waste and Fraud in Medicaid.” At the hearing, the OIG reported that neither CMS’s National Medicaid Audit Program nor the Medicare-Medicaid Data Match Program are effectively accomplishing their missions, since both programs had low findings of actual overpayments and actually yielded negative returns on investment, and they delivered very few referrals of potential fraud to OIG and law enforcement.
- On June 19, 2012, the House Ways and Means Health Subcommittee is scheduled to meet to discuss MedPAC’s June report to Congress.