Statist Boston Globe columnist
Bob Kuttner says:
But the biggest inefficiency is having private insurers as middlemen. Dare we say that out loud?
Democrats, even liberal ones, are gun-shy about being labeled tax-and-spend, even when public solutions are far more efficient and fair than private ones. And even in ''blue" Massachusetts, business has disproportionate leverage over what a Democrat can prudently say in a campaign, much less legislate.
We are still waiting for an outbreak of Democratic leadership in Washington. Let's see if it happens in Massachusetts.
Again we don't know what facts Comrade Kuttner is talking about.Medicaid is quite late in paying its bills in
Illinois.
The New York Times reports that fraud and inefficiency are the hallmarks of New York State's Medicaid program:
New York's Medicaid program is by far the most expensive and most generous in the nation. It spends far more - now $44.5 billion annually - than that of any other state, even California, whose Medicaid program covers about 55 percent more people. New York's Medicaid budget is larger than most states' entire budgets, and it spends nearly twice the national average - roughly $10,600, more than any other state - on each of its 4.2 million recipients, one in every five New Yorkers.
That generosity was born of good intentions when Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller signed the program into law in 1966, following the state's tradition of creating big antipoverty programs. But Medicaid has become far more than the child of that altruism, having morphed into an economic engine that fuels one of the state's biggest industries, leaving fraud and unnecessary spending to grow in its wake.
There are no precise estimates for the cost to the state's program. Officials who have spent their careers chasing unscrupulous doctors and other providers in New York Medicaid say the losses to taxpayers here are probably higher than typical estimates of overall health care fraud. The Government Accountability Office in Washington and others have estimated that 10 percent of all health care spending nationally is lost to "fraud and abuse."
I guess Bob Kuttner thinks fraud is not a problem in the government run health care.
