Illinois Congressman
Peter Roskam has written an important article in the Chicago Sun-Times. Here's a quote:
Just weeks ago, Jose Luis Perez fled the United States before law enforcement officials could arrest him, but not before he allegedly scammed $56 million in taxpayer money by defrauding Medicare. Described by the FBI as an "international traveler," Perez is just one of many criminals to take Medicare for millions of taxpayer dollars before jetting for safer and more exotic locales abroad.
As Washington intensely debates health-care reform, the cost of care has simultaneously emerged as the single biggest impetus for reform and the single largest obstacle to enacting reform. Democratic proposals have looked at the cost issue as a form of political capital to be exploited for political advantage, yet their proposed solution of a new government-run plan with a price tag in the trillions will do nothing to lower costs. That is hardly a solution at all. If Democrats were serious about substantively lowering costs, they would pursue real opportunities to meaningfully do so, starting with clamping down on waste, fraud and abuse in Medicare and Medicaid.
Waste and fraud occur frequently throughout the federal bureaucracy. Medicare and Medicaid, however, are exploited at breathtaking levels. Some estimates suggest that 10 percent of all health-care costs are fraudulent -- no small potatoes considering Medicare alone will cost $486 billion this year. Fraud permeates our entire country, including towns I represent in the western suburbs. Sometimes law enforcement officials catch these criminals and bring them to justice, but they often flee the U.S., or the fraud is simply never discovered.
Roskam makes an important comparison to the private sector:
While Medicare and Medicaid are undoubtedly in peril, there is a real way forward to lower costs and reform health care. The credit card industry, which handles $11 trillion in transactions yearly, suffers only .047 percent in fraud thanks to a system of real-time data review which stops fraud and abuse at the point of sale.
Credit card companies have an incentive to stop fraud. What incentive does a government bureaucrat at HHS have? Anyway, here's
more on the subject of Medicare fraud.
