The Center for Public Integrity

True fiscal hawks likely won’t find much to celebrate in this week’s budget machinations, talk of spending cuts aside. That’s because neither President Obama nor Congressional Republicans have much to say about cutting the entitlement programs that are driving the nation’s long-term debt problems.

Medicare doesn't know if all the prescriptions it is paying for are being written by real doctors, says a new inspector general's report.

High-tech, digital mammography may not be any better at detecting breast cancer in women over 65 than older film-based systems, but Medicare is spending millions of taxpayer dollars reimbursing the procedure at a far higher rate.

The Center analyzed Medicare claims data obtained from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). For the digital mammography analysis, the Center used a subset of the data submitted by physicians, hospitals and clinics from 2003 to 2008, the last year available at the time the data were acquired. Denied claims were excluded.

The salvo fired Wednesday by the co-chairs of a federal deficit reduction commission made clear that a host of budgetary sacred cows are in their sights — including Medicare, which is the subject of an ongoing Center for Public Integrity investigation.

Early this month, a group of 29 doctors gathered in a modern conference room at the Hyatt Regency Chicago, a few blocks from Lake Shore Drive. Over the course of four days, the little-known group of mostly specialists made a series of decisions crucial to the massive government entitlement program known as Medicare — issuing recommendations for precisely how Medicare should value more than 200 different medical procedures.

If Congress had known in 1965 how expensive Medicare would become, it might not have approved the program in the first place. So Lyndon Johnson made sure it didn’t know.