Their mandate has been to monitor all phases of the Medicare program on the local level. The fiscal and quality-of-care abuses uncovered by the Qui Tam suits all occurred in spite of the existence of the QIO’s.

       In March, 2006, the Institute of Medicine issued the Medicare’s Quality Improvement Organization Program: Maximizing Potential, a report very critical of QIO’s as they now function.  This followed a series of articles in the Washington Post in July, 2005, that discussed findings from the John’s Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health that concluded that hospitals working with QIO’s were no more likely to show improvement than hospitals that did not take part in the program
        It is beyond the scope of this paper to go further regarding Quality Improvement Organizations. It is sufficient to note that recent developments suggest that Congress has gotten the message.  All the money spent on healthcare has not bought United States citizens a first-class healthcare system. What it has bought is a system riddled with fraud, and a system that all too often maims and kills.
       Senator Charles E. Grassley, former Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, has initiated a broad reform of the QIO program.  He also drafted part of the Deficit Reduction Act, signed into law in February, 2006, that requires healthcare employees to “…ferret out fraud and report it to the government…” (see New York times, 12/24/06).  This same article noted that in the fiscal year ended 9/30/06, more than $3.1 billion dollars was recovered by the Government in fraudulent claims, 72% of which was from healthcare fraud.

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