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August 25, 2008

health care, harkin, and medicare waste

Shockingly Medicare is considered by some a successful entitlement program. I know it's mind boggling. The program is headed towards financial insolvency and there are people out there asking for it to be expanded. It doesn't make sense. You know what else doesn't make sense? Senator Tom Harkin is the answer to that question.

Senator Harkin spent August 16 meeting some fellow socialists at the Health Care for America Now (HCAN). Perhaps a better name for HCAN would be Chapter 11 Now (C11N). Not daunted by the current fiscal problems facing that nation Harkin had some ideas on how to bankrupt the country even quicker.

Senator Harkin, who supports the establishment of a comprehensive national health care plan, mentioned two possible means of achieving this:
2. Expand Medicare to cover all Americans. It would be much more difficult to get Congress to pass the second, he noted.

I'm sure it was a happy event. Senator Harkin signed the symbolic HCAN's Which Side Are You On? pledge (he even got his picture taken). Evidently Harkin is on the side of bankrupting the nation. HCAN is like countless groups in the United State. They are full of good initiations but they completely ignore the fact that government intervention into health care is making things worse.

Let's just look at the waste of Medicare. The New York Times had an article on Friday that shed some light on Medicare fraud.

In one example, the inspector general's investigation found that Medicare -- working only off of a supplier's paperwork -- had bought a power wheelchair for a beneficiary who neither needed nor used the device. The beneficiary did not know the ordering physician or the supplier, and the supposed ordering physician denied placing the order or knowing either the patient or the supply company.

The inspector general's report pegged the rate of improper payments for medical equipment at 31.5 percent, an astonishingly high proportion that implies improper spending of some $2.8 billion, four times what Medicare had claimed.

31.5 percent of medical equipment claims are fraud! That's not a typo. I wouldn't be surprised if at least 20 percent of the entire budget is fraud. The Medicare and Medicaid programs cost the United States $627 billion in 2007 and the cost of the program is expected to double in the next decade. A 20 percent fraud rate would add up to nearly $125 billion dollars a year (that's a low estimate). How much is $125 billion? It's enough to cover costs in Iraq for a year and it's more than the GDP of Ecuador, Bulgaria, Lithuanian, and Croatia.

Sure, let's expand this program! It's unbelievable to me that people keep coming up with new programs when we can't afford the ones we already have. Good intentions are not an excuse for stupidity.

Posted by nemov at August 25, 2008 7:43 PM

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Every election year there's tons of rhetoric about Health Care. It's a popular issue with Democrats and most Americans "feel bad" about the uninsured. When people "feel bad" it normally means that government intervention is coming. Should we feel bad?... [Read More]

Tracked on September 10, 2008 7:19 PM

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Posted by: brown at August 26, 2008 12:06 PM

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