Medicare Fraud - Billions Today, Trillions Tomorrow?

Yesterday we examined the dismal future of the nation's health care system and financials if the current Obama health care reform bill is passed. Hospitals and nursing homes opting out of Medicare because of reduced costs which would restrict medical care access, increased doctors' fees caused by increasing the number of insured by 30 million, skyrocketing deficits, etc. Today, let's look at how government runs its health care responsibilities in the present time and what implications that has for the future.

The basis of tonight's post is an AP article that appeared in the St. Petersburg Times on November 15, 2009 which reported on a new federal auditing report on Medicare. Highlights of the AP article including the following:

• The Federal government has paid out more than $47 billion in questionable Medicare claims.
• Many of the claims for treatment showed little correlation to the patient's condition. Examples cited included paying for blood glucose strips to treat sexual impotence and diabetic shoes for leg amputees.
• Suspect claims included paying for prescriptions written by doctors who were no longer alive.
• This is not the first time these types of mismanagement accusations have been made by government auditors. According to the article, Medicare fraud has been cited by auditors for 20 years and despite past "aggressive actions", no discernible progress has been made to reduce suspect payments.
• The report found that sometimes brokers go door-to-door looking for new citizens that barely speak English to "buy" their Medicare number for hundreds of dollars and then use the numbers to commit fraud.
• If questionable payments are $47 billion a year and the annual Medicare budget is $440 billion a year, as reported in the article, then the fraud rate is at an unbelievably high rate of almost 11%.

And this program has been around for decades and the political class has not been able to get fraud under control. Imagine how much money will be wasted if and when Obama and Democrats start spending TRILLIONS of dollars on health care reform.

The article did say that the Obama administration was going to announce efforts to counteract fraud this week including "a government-wide Web site aimed at providing a full account of health care spending and improper payments made by various agencies." Wow, now I feel better. I am sure this website will scare the illegal brokers to death and they will immediately stop their fraud activities.

The bottom line is that the political class and the government it runs is incapable of efficiently and cost effectively running any kind of major (or minor) program. An 11% fraud rate is totally unacceptable. Imagine what could be done with that kind of wasted money:

• if returned to the taxpayer, every U.S. household would get a check for about $361.
• if an average teacher's salary is about $50,000 a year, you could put 94,000 teachers to work for ten years.
• imagine how many bullet proof vests and armored personnel carriers could be bought for our troops in war zones.

The waste boggles the mind and now Obama and the Democrats want to exponentially increase the waste with the currently proposed health care reform bill. The way to solve the health care cost problem was reviewed yesterday and I will not repeat the solution again today as laid out in "Love My Country, Loathe My Government", Step 28. However, you can bet that any solution to fraud in the current system will not be solved by a website, it needs to be addressed by criminal investigations and prosecutions.

Visit our website at www.loathemygovernment.com to order an autographed copy of the book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government -Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom and Destroying The American Political Class" and to sign up for the cause. The book is also available online at Amazon and Barnes And Noble.