As a young man who hasn’t been to the doctor in more than three years and doesn’t even remember the last prescription he was prescribed, I am in no danger of having my Medicare defrauded by a shady temporary company with my name and medicare code. Many healthy seniors, however, are falling victim to just that, and I had no idea how successful the frauds are: billing Medicare 60 billion dollars in phony charges last year, or over $1000 per Medicare member.
As membership swells with our aging population, it will probably get worse unless drastic action is taken. It’s a tremendously lucrative crime, apparently; an industry in and of itself, and one that has been fairly easy to pull off. That this kind of rampant fraud can go on does not bode well for a public insurance option. Of course, Medicare isn’t going anywhere…but up, and even with advances in technology and a crackdown by the Justice Department, the chances of a rapidly expanding bureaucracy whose job is to reimburse healthcare providers being able to keep fraud under control seems like a foregone conclusion in the negative.
If President Obama is looking for areas to create jobs, I have a suggestion: hire more people to audit providers and weed out the fraud and system-gaming. All Medicare needs is more manpower, and training can’t possibly be that hard. Tens of thousands of people if not more are involved in actively cleaning up off of Medicare fraud, and the taxpayers are paying for it. Yet the people responsible for stopping that fraud probably number in the dozens. That’s a recipe for disaster, to the tune of more than $60 billion.
The ten-year cost of healthcare reform is around $1 trillion. Medicare fraud alone over that period could exceed $600 billion, or most of the cost of that reform. That’s money out of our pockets and into the bank accounts of criminals, plain and simple. I don’t see why we can’t create hundreds if not thousands of jobs and stamp out some of this horrific fraud at the same time.
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