Reprise: Medicare-Medicaid waste & fraud … stop yakking and fix it already.

This was originally posted July 23.

Six weeks later, it’s still Obama’s silver bullet for covering some added healthcare costs … but nothing has been done. If the “nut” is so juicy, go crack it already. Comprehensive healthcare reform isn’t required to root out waste and fraud in existing programs. We’ve wasted another $6.5 billion since my last post on the subject. Hmmm.

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Currently, U.S. health care expenditures are about $2,1 trillion (just over $7,000 per person).

Of that, roughly half is already government administered via Medicare and Medicaid.

Would someone please explain to me:

(!) Why Obama’s crack team doesn’t fix the problem instead of just constantly whining about it ? My hunch: finding random instances of abuse is easy, but ferreting out fraud en masse is hard to do – and fixing it requires a massive overhaul of systems and procedures. If more people or resources are required, spell them out and get Congress to approve them post haste.

(2) If that half of the national healthcare budget is managed so badly by the government, why should we expect that the government will do any better with the other half if they take that over?

Ken’s Take: How about the government fix Medicare-Medicaid starting today, and when success is evident, come back and pitch to take over the other half.

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Hard Facts

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This entry was posted on September 10, 2009 at 7:59 am and is filed under Health Care / Medical Insurance, Obama Administration. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “Reprise: Medicare-Medicaid waste & fraud … stop yakking and fix it already.”

Mike Says:
July 24, 2009 at 1:53 am | Reply
I think there is a good chance that my employer would switch to a government healthcare plan if it lowered their OPEX.

Nobody is talking about the lack of capacity to absorb tens of millions of additional customers into our existing healthcare system. Our current healthcare system appears maxed out. Nurse and doctor shortages are commonplace throughout the country. The answer? Ration a scarce resource. Those of us who are fortunate enough to have healthcare will have less access to healthcare in the future. Where’s the plan to expand health care capacity? What’s our plan for producing more doctors and nurses? What’s the plan to expand our hospitals? There is no plan to expand capacity.

It would be nice to see that list of problems with our healthcare systems.

The Homa Files