Show 469.5 60 Minutes tried to portray the Obama administration favorably. Attorney General Eric Holder said they had earmarked $200 million to the Medicare fraud division in the stimulus package.
massive:
But Tony, who has just begun serving his 12 year prison sentence, says there's no shortage of people in Miami waiting to take his place.
Asked how many people in Miami were doing this, Tony said, "I'd say at least 2,000 people. At least 2,000, 3,000 companies."
He estimated that less than 5% of these companies were legitimate.
And that's just Miami. #2: Government bureaucratic intervention will only encourage crooks to become more sophisticated while punishing legitimate companies - and increase the bureaucracy - by forcing them to fill out endlessly more paperwork.
Per MN Public Radio via Kaiser Health News:
Medicare fraud is difficult to find and prosecute without whistleblowers, says MN federal prosecutor Gerald Wilhelm. "'Medicare cases are often what I call the death of a thousand ankle bites,' Wilhelm said. 'Every bad claim is a dollar, but there are a billion bad claims so it's a billion dollars, and so to look at all of those claims is impossible.'" While some cases are obvious, "many cases fall into a gray area that mean second-guessing a physician's decisions." But "[t]he Medicare statute itself prohibits the government from interfering with the practice of medicine. Wilhelm said the question with Medicare is often whether a clinic billed the government for a more complex procedure than it performed or than the patient needed. He said it's like buying a Chevrolet and charging the government for a Cadillac."
And as much as MSM would like to portray Obama as the 1st Enlightened One to attain the presidency, not so fast. Kim Brandt, Medicare's director of program integrity, told Kroft, ""[O]ur primary focus over the past years has been to tighten our enrollment standards to make it so it's much harder for people like that to be able to get in the program, and to be able to commit that kind of fraud."
Well, that "primary focus" hasn't borne any antifraud fruit.
Brandt added, "Well, it really does come down to the size and scope of the Medicare program, and the resources that are dedicated to oversight and anti fraud work."
And the "size and scope" of nationalized healthcare would only be Medicaid on steroids."
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