On Monday, Townhall posted an article about the impact of fraud on the lifespan of Medicare.
The article reports:
America has a serious entitlement-spending problem, and the scale of Medicare fraud is making it worse.
Over the weekend, Dr. Mehmet Oz, administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, warned that Medicare’s trust fund is projected to become insolvent within the next six to seven years. But Oz argued that by eliminating fraud, waste, and abuse within the program, it could double the it’s lifespan, delivering twice as many years of benefits without asking taxpayers to pour even more money into the already broken system.
The article quotes Dr. Oz:
“I’ll just put it in the context of what you just gave me. The insolvency of the Medicare trust fund, which is gonna happen in six to seven years, it’ll last twice as long, think about that, twice as many years of benefits if we just take the fraud out of Medicare,” Dr. Oz said on CBS News’ Face the Nation. “Forget about everything else. Just this past year, we cut $42 billion of fraud from Medicare by never leaving the money out of the door. And those are the kinds of benefits. We’re seeing dramatic changes in durable medical equipment fraud by a nationwide moratorium. 42 billion, the federal government paid 1.2 trillion on Medicare benefits. That’s just the beginning. That was last year. We hadn’t even gotten to full speed.”
“But let me just point one reality out. This is important. The fraud doesn’t just steal money. It steals our trust. And we have states that are not working closely with us on these issues. And that’s because in some cases, what’s fraud to us, objectively, is actually a feature for the states,” he continued. “But you’re acknowledging that while important work is not sufficient to that massive financial problem. The even bigger benefit. More needs to be done.”
Eliminating the fraud is a wonderful idea. However, we also need to hold the people accountable who committed the fraud and also take measures to make sure the spending of taxpayer money is more carefully monitored. It’s hard to believe that those writing the checks didn’t see some questionable patterns in the payments being made.