More Medicare fraud
August 27th, 2008 | by Brian Schwartz |From last week’s New York Times:
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. …
Equipment sellers have submitted counterfeit documents, forged doctors’ signatures and filed claims on behalf of patients who were dead or had never been seen by the prescribing physician, according to many reports by government oversight agencies.
For more examples of fraud and the connection to the “Medicaid has lower administrative costs” mantra, see here. Too bad you don’t have the choice to donate your hard-earned income to a better charity. Government should not be in the insurance business, especially when its revenue derives from forcing taxpayers to donate. That’s immoral. Medicare should be phased out.
(Via Michael Cannon at Cato)
