Entitlement Bandits

[Geee]

National Review:


The budget blueprint crafted by Paul Ryan, passed by the House of Representatives, and voted down by the Senate would essentially give Medicare enrollees a voucher to purchase private coverage, and would change the federal government’s contribution to each state’s Medicaid program from an unlimited “matching” grant to a fixed “block” grant. These reforms deserve to come back from defeat, because the only alternatives for saving Medicare or Medicaid would either dramatically raise tax rates or have the government ration care to the elderly and disabled. What may be less widely appreciated, however, is that the Ryan proposal is our only hope of reducing the crushing levels of fraud in Medicare and Medicaid.

The three most salient characteristics of Medicare and Medicaid fraud are: It’s brazen, it’s ubiquitous, and it’s other people’s money, so nobody cares.

Consider some of the fraud schemes discovered in recent years. In Brooklyn, a dentist billed taxpayers for nearly 1,000 procedures in a single day. A Houston doctor with a criminal record took her Medicare billings from zero to $11.6 million in one year; federal agents shut down her clinic but did not charge her with a crime. A high-school dropout, armed with only a laptop computer, submitted more than 140,000 bogus Medicare claims, collecting $105 million. A health plan settled a Medicaid-fraud case in Florida for $138 million. The giant hospital chain Columbia/HCA paid $1.7 billion in fines and pled guilty to more than a dozen felonies related to bribing doctors to help it tap Medicare funds and exaggerating the amount of care delivered to Medicare patients. In New York, Medicaid spending on the human-growth hormone Serostim leapt from $7 million to $50 million in 2001; but it turned out that drug traffickers were getting the drug prescribed as a treatment for AIDS wasting syndrome, then selling it to bodybuilders. And a study of ten states uncovered $27 million in Medicare payments to dead patients.