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WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Democratic senators on weekday expressed concern that companies hired to support pay and oversee scrutiny claims under the Medicare upbeat insurance information may hit costly conflicts of interest.

Subsidiaries of WellPoint Inc, Hewlett Packard Co's EDS Corp., today titled HP Enterprise Services, and added companies hit "numerous relationships" that improve concern, the lawmakers' body wrote in note free on Tuesday.

Congressional staffers said they looked at those and several added Medicare contractors that the polity has hired to monitor the bills that doctors and added aid providers send the polity after treating Medicare patients.

The staffers found that some companies had "clear business relationships" much as existence a supplementary of added company charged with actually stipendiary discover a verify and processing it, according to the memo.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), an agency of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), oversees Medicare, the federal information that provides upbeat insurance to most 47 million elderly and disabled Americans.

CMS uses private companies for a range of activities from billing services and payment fault to providing alternative, privately separate drug benefits or upbeat coverage.

"We need a thorough communicating of relationships between the contractors stipendiary Medicare claims and their related corporate entities in charge of overseeing those aforementioned payments to attain sure taxpayer dollars aren't existence wasted," Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus said in a statement.

CONGRESS HOLDS HEARINGS

The findings by congressional staffers come as both houses of legislature this week prepare to look at aid waste and fraud.

On Wednesday, the Senate Finance Committee and the House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee organisation to question Obama brass officials and others most Medicare and Medicaid fraud. Medicaid is the state-federal upbeat insurance information for the poor.

Overall, wrong stipendiary aid providers likewise much money is estimated to cost the federal polity nearly $50 1000000000 a assemblage while abuse costs most $60 billion, according to the body findings.

Such forfeited revenue is a field concern for lawmakers struggling to transfer the federal government's budget while grappling with a soaring deficit.

Medicare is the nation's maximal vendee of aid services in the United States -- it paid out, for example, $502 1000000000 in 2009 benefits. It also is the government's large entitlement program.

Experts had due the information to go smash as primeval as 2017 but today see it surviving until 2029 in the wake of payment cuts and added changes prefabricated under President Barack Obama's aid improve law passed terminal year.

Lawmakers of both parties and the Obama brass hit spinous to edge business waste as one way to spend the polity zillions of dollars.

Along with Senators blackamoor Carper and Claire McCaskill, who lead subcommittees on the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, Baucus is asking the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' inspector general to investigate.

If there are conflicts of interest, that does not needs mean the companies are geared in fraud or waste, the lawmakers' body said in their memo. But even if they are not, it could still lead to the attendance of a problem, they added.

(Reporting by Susan Heavey; Editing by Will Dunham)

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