Author Kathleen Sharp says the government isn't doing enough to fight health-care fraud, which some estimate costs hundreds of billions of dollars a year:

At the beginning of this year, the Justice Department had more than 1,300 whistle-blower cases under investigation, the bulk of them related to pharmaceuticals, hospital chains and health care companies. That’s up from the 900 or so cases that were stalled during the end of the Bush administration. To be fair, the department has long been understaffed when it comes to health care investigations. But in 2009, the Justice Department and the Department of Health and Human Services were given an additional $198 million to combat health care fraud. Neither the money nor a new task force seem to have helped much.

Last year, the Justice Department recovered $3 billion in false claims, $2.5 billion of that from health care cases. But that’s just a drop in the bucket. It’s gotten so that even if a case is settled, many pharmaceutical companies simply write it off as the cost of doing business.