by hilzoy
Is there any corner of the Bush administration -- any at all -- that isn't hopelessly corrupt? Actually, don't answer that...
"Medicare’s top officials said in 2006 that they had reduced the number of fraudulent and improper claims paid by the agency, keeping billions of dollars out of the hands of people trying to game the system.But according to a confidential draft of a federal inspector general’s report, those claims of success, which earned Medicare wide praise from lawmakers, were misleading.
In calculating the agency’s rate of improper payments, Medicare officials told outside auditors to ignore government policies that would have accurately measured fraud, according to the report. For example, auditors were told not to compare invoices from salespeople against doctors’ records, as required by law, to make sure that medical equipment went to actual patients.
As a result, Medicare did not detect that more than one-third of spending for wheelchairs, oxygen supplies and other medical equipment in its 2006 fiscal year was improper, according to the report. Based on data in other Medicare reports, that would be about $2.8 billion in improper spending.
That same year, Medicare officials told Congress that they had succeeded in driving down the cost of fraud in medical equipment to $700 million.
Some lawmakers and Congressional staff members say the irregularities that the inspector general found were tantamount to corruption and raise broader questions about the credibility of other Medicare figures.
“This is outrageous,” said Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, the top-ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, who has repeatedly credited the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services with reducing improper expenditures. “If heads don’t roll, you can’t change the culture of this organization,” he added."
If you don't so much as try to detect fraud, you won't catch it. If you don't catch it, it will increase -- and why not, when you can get free money without risking anything? If it increases, not only do our costs go up, the apparent cost of expanding government programs to help the uninsured goes up as well, expanding those programs looks more expensive than it really is, and so the likelihood that we will actually do something to help people who are reduced to pulling out their rotting teeth with pliers goes down.
I want these people out of my government now.
Recent Comments