The U.S. Department of Justice could dub 2013 the year its fight against Medicare billing fraud in Southeast Michigan yielded the first real payoff. Last year, the Detroit Medicare Fraud Strike Force, deployed here from Washington, and a locally organized Health Care Fraud Unit of prosecutors together brought charges in fraud schemes billing more than $380 million to the federal program. That's more than double the bad billing amount charged in any preceding year.

Under False Claims Act, whistleblowers get their share of billions Constance Lyttle's job at AT&T slowly shifted from helping deaf people make phone calls, to assisting the efforts of foreign scam artists intent on ripping off Americans. She refused to play along, and was eventually fired by AT&T, which was getting millions of dollars in government funds to run a scam-plagued system for relaying the calls of deaf people. "I didn't have a college degree. There's not a lot of good jobs here" in the Mercer area, Ms. Lyttle, 56, said this month. "I had bills to pay, just like everybody else in America."