Bass, Berry & Sims attorney Brian Roark provided comments for an article discussing whether sequestration led to decreased healthcare fraud recoveries in 2015. These automatic budget cuts effected the anti-fraud resources available to enforce federal healthcare programs and some question whether this lack of resources caused the drop in recoveries between 2014 ($3.3 billion) and 2015 ($2.4 billion). As Brian points out in the article, “the decline was probably due to a smaller number of large-dollar settlements and that it’s not necessarily an indication of any long-term trends.”
The full article, “Sequestration Hampered Gov. Anti-Fraud Efforts, Agencies Say,” was published by Bloomberg BNA’s Health Law Resource Center on February 29, 2016, and is available online.
Brian’s comments were also included in the blog post from March 7, 2016, “Are Anti-fraud Efforts Hurt by Budget Sequestration?” published on Bloomberg BNA’s Health Care Blog.