- President Barack Obama is out and abroad stumping like
mad for his embattled health insurance "reform" plan, claiming
now that his administration will "crack down" on $100 billion
in annual "waste and fraud" in the Medicare and Medicaid systems.
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- This new tough rhetoric is meant to win over some of
the conservative opposition that sees all government programs as inherently
wasteful, inefficient and corrupt.
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- But the claim itself is bogus.
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- The figure comes from a study done annually by the Centers
for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), and that study makes it clear
that it is not looking at fraud, but at errors. And there are two things
that can be said about those errors, most of which appear to involve problems
like illegible signatures on doctors' orders, or lost paperwork needed
to document that a treatment being billed for actually happened.
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- The first point to make here is that such errors are
equally prevalent in the private sector, only the chances are that in the
private sector, the errors more often lead to shortchanging or denying
care to the patient, while in the public sector, they as often lead to
somebody or some institution getting paid more than they deserve for treating
a patient.
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- Second, the errors in the Medicare program (there has
been no systematic study, according to a spokesman at CMS, of error and
fraud in the Medicaid program, much of which is funded and managed by the
various states), cut both ways, with some errors leading to an overpayment
or a payment for a service that wasn't actually provided, and some errors
leading to an underpayment for a service that was provided...
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- For the rest of this story, please go to:
- http://www.thiscantbehappening.net
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