Medicare fraud

Matt Kapp has written a truly dreadful column on health care reform in the latest Vanity Fair, the gist of which is that companies involved in the health care industry are bad because they make money. Sifting through the dreck, however, I came across one very good point:

Giant settlements for lab-billing scams have been commonplace since the 1980s, but Congress has failed to implement any real anti-fraud protections for Medicare: a paltry $756 million is currently devoted to fraud prevention, less than one-fifth of one percent of Medicare’s annual budget. Given the unbridled pillaging going on, it’s little wonder Medicare is projected to become insolvent by 2017. The Government Accountability Office has estimated that 10 cents of every dollar spent on Medicare is lost to fraud, which means that $42 billion is expected to vanish this year. That’s $280 picked from the pocket of every wage-earning American.

And next time you hear about how Medicare has such lower overhead than privately-run health insurance companies -- overhead that includes fraud prevention -- you'll know why. One can only speculate how much fraud and waste would be present in a "public option".