WASHINGTON — The federal government recovered a record $4.2 billion last fiscal year from medical providers and others who fraudulently billed government health care programs such as Medicare, setting a record, the Obama administration announced Monday.

The 2012 tally extends a years-long trend and reflects ongoing efforts by the Obama administration to crack down on health care fraud.

The president's health care law also includes new initiatives to weed out fraudulent medical providers and bar them from receiving Medicare reimbursements.

“Our historic effort to take on the criminals who steal from Medicare and Medicaid is paying off: We are gaining the upper hand,” Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said.

In the last four years, enforcement efforts have yielded $14.9 billion, up from $6.7 billion over the previous four years, according to the administration.

LOS ANGELES — Homeowners who took on mortgages well after the housing bubble burst are doing a better job in keeping up with payments, a trend that has helped push the national rate of late payments on home loans to the lowest level in four years.The percentage of mortgage holders at least two months behind on their payments fell in the fourth quarter to 5.19 percent from 6.01 percent a year earlier, credit reporting agency TransUnion said today.The rate hasn’t been that low since December 2008, a time when home prices were sliding, the U.S. economy was in recession and many adjustable-rate mortgages taken out by homebuyers with less-than-perfect credit were in the process of resetting to a higher rate.Those ARM resets triggered higher payments that many borrowers couldn’t afford, sending late payment rates higher into 2009. In addition, the national unemployment rate was on an upward trajectory in 2008.