Medicare insures 49 million Americans a year, at a cost of about $604 billion annually – and spent another $1.5 billion fighting health-care fraud last year. But a loose system of investigators can’t reliably spot suspicious billing.

Medicare made public the details of $77 billion in payments to doctors, labs, ambulance companies, and other medical providers in an effort to increase transparency and get the public’s help identifying improper payments.Within days of the document dump, Bloomberg News, the New York Times, USA Today, and ProPublica, among others, did just that, uncovering tens of millions of dollars’ worth of questionable billing practices, as well as payments to doctors whose checkered records the federal government may not have been aware of. Read more…