$60 Billion in Medicare Fraud
Government’s more efficient in providing health care? You’ll hear that line over and over again. How efficient is it, though, to waste $60 billion a year in paying fraudulent claims, including to men who do nothing but sit in strip malls and collect money for … doing nothing. Click through for a link to a “60 Minutes” expose about a program that offers “a rich and steady stream” of income for criminals.
UPDATE: I received an e-mail disputing the $60 billion number.
I see you’re trafficking the Heritage claim of $60 billion Medicare fraud. It is unsubstantiated: The Office of the Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services is unable to estimate how much fraud Medicare suffers.[i] Nationwide, at least 3 percent of health spending is lost to fraud: $68 billion in 2008.[ii]
[i] Daniel R. Levinson, Statement on Combating Fraud, Waste, and Abuse in Medicare and Medicaid, testimony before the U.S. Senate Special Committee on Aging (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, May 6, 2009).
[ii] NHCAA, The Problem of Health Care Fraud (Washington, DC: National Health Care Anti-Fraud Association, 2009). Available at http://www.nhcaa.org/eweb/DynamicPage.aspx?webcode=anti_fraud_resource_centr&wpscode=TheProblemOfHCFraud#1. NB: Secondary sources often wrongly cite this as the losses from fraud to the Medicare program alone.
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I believe that Obama stated that the Medicare fraud amount was 85-Billion a year (Famous speach to Congress during which he was called a liar). Hyper-link to the speach can be found on YouTube……