Senate Finance Committee investigators working for Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) are trying to solve the mystery of who made secret changes to a federal database used to record how much the government spends on drugs under the Medicaid program.
In a letter to Kerry Weems, acting administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the agency within the Department of Health and Human Services that oversees Medicaid, Grassley demanded to know why retroactive changes were made to the database, who is responsible for updating the information and whether federal reimbursement decisions were affected by the numbers. Grassley wants to know whether the changes indicate a massive accounting error or, even worse, are evidence that billions of dollars were somehow improperly paid out to states and drug companies over a period of several years. The total amount of the discrepancy could reach well into the tens of billions of dollars, said one source familiar with the issue.
For the five drugs that Grassley singled out in his letter, government records have been changed to show roughly $1 billion less in payments in 2006 than the same database showed for that same year as recently as December 2007.
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