Medicare Fraud

The Feds are at it again.  Agents "swarmed in" and arrested 12 people on charges of running Medicare fraud schemes that defrauded the government and us out of $95 million.  Hooray!  Some of those arrested included three medical doctors, a doctor of osteopathy and a chiropractor and maybe a partridge in a pear tree though I am not sure about that last one.   The Feds have their own task force to get people like this and so far have charged more than 1,130 defendants across the country with false billing. These cases really seem egregious and thankfully they were solved.   That being said, what about those little cases?  What if the Feds get frisky and are really want to make some money?  Physicians do their best to code each visit but what if the Feds hire bounty hunters to go in an aggressive audit docs and find stuff that was not to their liking?  I am talking about doctors who are not malicious but just aren't great coders.  Or, what if companies that are hired by docs or their employers to aggregate data to report to the CMS for "quality" bonus monies make mistakes?  With this new P4P trend there is a lot of cash at stake and docs seem to want it.  It sure seems some fudging may happen.  Could CMS send people to "swarm" in on them?  I would think not but I do think we could end up with another slippery slope here.  Where is Nucky Thompson when you did him?