As part of his ongoing road show to make his supposedly closing argument to pass a health care bill, President Obama used a trip to St. Louis as an oppourtunity to step up efforts to root out Medicare fraud by increasing audits. I’m glad that Obama is drawing attention to the issue, which I wrote about at greater length last fall — by some estimates $100 billion or more is being stolen from the easily-gamed system. But with that said, I have no idea why confronting Medicare fraud would require passage of a massive national health care program that raises taxes, forces individuals to purchase government-approved insurance against their will, and creates a new entitlement in which individuals use government subsidies to purchase government-designed insurance policies on government-run exchanges.
