Medicare paid $23 million to dead people

Millions of dollars' worth of Medicare payments are going to people who aren't alive to receive the money. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services doled out $23 million in benefits to 17,403 deceased beneficiaries in 2011, a new inspector general's audit. The audit was done by cross-referencing Medicare recipients with Social Security death records from 2009 to 2011.

The agency has been in the crossfire recently for its central role administering healthcare.gov, the Obamacare website. The improper Medicare payments are often the result of fraudsters submitting false claims and assuming the identities of people who are deceased. Just last year, a man was arrested for submitting $2.1 million in bogus Medicare claims -- including 10 claims for beneficiaries who were dead, according to the report.

Other times, a deceased beneficiary's file doesn't include a date of death, leading the agency to continue issuing payments. While 58% of the improper Medicare payments were under $1,000, 12 were more than $50,000 each. Two payments, for recipients who had died more than a year earlier, exceeded $100,000 each. Read more >>