Tom Carper

I think those resources can be brought to bear here, and it is almost an incentive system.

One of the ideas is to allow the employees who stop smoking, lose weight, control their cholesterol, control their blood pressure to actually receive premium discounts for up to 30 percent if they do the right thing for themselves and for…

We are talking about billions of dollars we are trying to capture.

Are there audits that you are awaiting permission to begin?

Somebody else? Dr. Jensen.

Let me just interrupt you if I can. I mentioned earlier the program that we are running, initially in three States, with the recovery audit contractors where we recovered through last year about $700 million.

Every now and then I ask witnesses--as we try to drill down and find out where we can save some money, I ask the witnesses to just say what can the Legislative Branch of our government be doing better.

Dedicated those errors or dedicated the resources? You said 'dedicated those errors,' but you mean dedicated resources.

The next step is to go out and recover the money that has been improperly paid if there is a recovery to be had.

Let me come back to, I think, Ms. King and also Mr. Blum on the next question.

If we want to recover these monies, in some cases prevent the fraud from occurring but recover monies that have been defrauded.

I think IRS has a similar kind of approach where we recover monies that have been, frankly, recovered because of tax evasion.

The larger the database, the greater the potential for identifying fraud.

I think there are some very important provisions pending now in health reform that will give CMS more tools to oversee and to strengthen the Part D program.

What more should we be doing, Ms. King?

We are going to require them to, and then come back later on this year with some way to incentivize them.

We know we have these huge budget deficits. We know the Medicare trust fund is running out of money.

We have been using recovery audit contractors... to go out and try to track down fraud and recover money.

I actually voted to create [the Medicare prescription drug program], and we want to hear about not just the good that it is doing.

I think your idea of asking GAO to come back to us in about 6 months is a good one.

If we want to incentivize people to be whistleblowers, why don't we at least try to protect them?

It is a serious issue, and the oversight of prescription drugs is incredibly important.

I think it is time we take a very hard look at this program as to whether or not the taxpayers are getting a bang for their buck.

It is not enough to be good. You have to be great and continue to get better.

I have always felt that it would be hard to make much progress on comprehensive immigration reform until the Congress and, frankly, our constituents felt that we had done all we could to secure our borders.