The Administration on Aging (AoA) is dedicated to promoting consumer awareness, preventing elder victimization, and working to implement community partnerships to prevent Medicare and Medicaid fraud, error, and abuse. By informing and training senior volunteers, aging network personnel, and health care providers, AoA wants to make older Americans and their advocates better health care consumers.
The mission of AoA’s Anti Fraud and Abuse Team is to serve as the agency’s focal point for coordinating, implementing, monitoring, expanding, evaluating, and promoting efforts to provide consumer information and protection designed to detect, prevent and report error, fraud and abuse in the Medicare and Medicaid programs.
Since 1997, the U.S. Administration on Aging (AoA) has worked in partnership with the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Inspector General, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (formerly the Health Care Financing Administration), the Department of Justice, community-based grantees, retired professionals, service and health care providers, AARP, and other interested individuals and organizations to address this serious national problem.
In the initial phase of this initiative, known as ORT, $23 was returned in improper payments, fines and settlements for every dollar spent on the effort.
Today, AoA provides grants to community-based agencies in nearly every state to train volunteers how to educate Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries and their families how to protect their Medicare number as they would their credit card, how to take a more active role in protecting their health care programs, and how to detect and report potential instances of error, fraud, and abuse.
