Tag Archives: CMS Administrator Dr. Mehemet Oz

Fraud Makes A Difference

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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.

Where The Money Went

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On Friday, The Federalist posted an article about how Medicaid money was spent.

The article reports:

Five states and Washington, D.C., funneled more than $1.35 billion in federal taxpayer Medicaid funding to illegals, according to a preliminary audit of the program completed by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).

CMS Administrator Dr. Mehemet Oz posted the results of the preliminary audit on social media showing California, D.C., Illinois, Washington, Colorado, and Oregon spent millions each on illegals, with California spending the bulk, topping over $1.3 billion alone.

That money, according to Oz, was spent “just in the last few months.”

The left constantly claims this does not, or even cannot, happen because it is against federal law to use programs like Medicaid — something meant for Americans — for illegals, but that small sample of states shows that states are defrauding the American people out of their own programs to the tune of billions of dollars.

That claim is even more spurious considering the Democrats are only days away from breaking the all-time longest government shutdown record because they care more about funding health care for illegals than citizens of their own country.

“Some want to deny that illegal immigrants are receiving Medicaid. Others insist it’s illegal for Medicaid to cover illegal immigrants. And others accurately point out that hospitals can provide emergency services to illegal immigrants under the program,” Oz said, noting CMS is intending to have the money returned to them.

The article concludes:

Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations seemed to have alleviated some of the pressure from certain emergency rooms notorious for being abused by illegal aliens, as The Federalist reported, but Dr. Jared Ross, an emergency room doctor, said that illegals being kicked off Medicaid from the OBBB could have the unintended consequence of turning them toward emergency rooms instead of going to general practitioners using insurance.

Reforms in the OBBB are necessary to stop American taxpayers and communities from having to deal with the burden illegal aliens put on their health programs and institutions, but another major avenue of reform will be altering EMTALA to limit illegal immigrants’ capacity to abuse the system.

American taxpayers cannot afford to continue to support people who are here illegally.