Think about
Harvard Professor Malcolm Sparrow's Senate testimony:
The units of measure for losses due to health care fraud and
abuse in this country are hundreds of billions of dollars per
year. We just don't know the first digit. It might be as low as
one hundred billion. More likely two or three. Possibly four or
five. But whatever that first digit is, it has eleven zeroes
after it. These are staggering sums of money to waste, and the
task of controlling and reducing these losses warrants a great
deal of serious attention. One of my deep regrets is to
discover that academia has paid almost no serious attention to
this critical problem. I suspect this neglect is because the
art of health care fraud control falls awkwardly between the
traditional disciplines of health economics, health policy,
crime control policy, anomaly detection and pattern
recognition.
That's right. Fraud, waste, and abuse in the federal
government's medical programs runs somewhere between $100 billion
and $500 billion. We just don't know the first
number. But there certainly are 11 zeroes afterwards.
Yes, wouldn't a new public health insurance plan be a grand
idea! At least, it would be for the crooks who are
doing so well milking taxpayers through Medicare and Medicaid!
(Hat-tip to Chris Edwards of the Cato Institute.)
About the Author
Doug Bandow is a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute and the Senior Fellow in International Religious Persecution at the Institute on Religion and Public Policy. A former Special Assistant to President Ronald Reagan, he is author of Beyond Good Intentions: A Biblical View of Politics (Crossway).
