Over 200 people, who are among the group most likely to commit welfare fraud for Medicaid and Medicare insurance benefits, were arrested?after swindling the government out of $712 million dollars.
The GOP would have you believe that tax dollars are being stolen?by people like Reagan’s “Cadillac-driving welfare queen,” who he insisted
“used 80 names, 30 addresses, 15 telephone numbers to collect food stamps, Social Security, veterans? benefits for four nonexistent deceased veteran husbands, as well as welfare. Her tax-free cash income alone has been running $150,000 a year.”
As it turns out, Medicaid and Medicare fraud costs taxpayers the second-highest amount of money, about $14.5 billion dollars per year, of any government welfare program that exists (the first is negative income tax – or tax refund amounts that are not accurately reported and/or distributed by the IRS). ?According to federalsafetynet.com, fraudulently-received SNAP and TANF benefits are further down the list.
So, who’s committing this fraud? Who are these lazy bums stealing tax dollars from hard-working Americans to get Medicaid and Medicare insurance money, living the high life while we work and pay for it all?
As it turns out, it’s the medical industry, who?have created myriad ways to bilk the government of insurance money, such as:
- Billing for Services Not Provided
- Double Billing
- Billing for Phantom Visits
- Billing for More Hours Than There Are In A Day
- Falsifying Credentials
- Substitution of Generic Drugs
- Billing for Unnecessary Services or Tests
- Billing for More Expensive Procedures than were Performed
- Kickbacks
- False Cost Reports
These aren’t the only methods used to defraud health insurance welfare programs, either. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle reports that?doctors, nurses, and other healthcare professionals have also
“lured people recruited from low-income neighborhoods, homeless shelters and welfare offices to corrupt medical clinics for unnecessary tests with the promise of free footwear such as sneakers, shoes and boots.”
Remember the whole “we should drug test welfare recipients!” argument? Another way in which the medical establishment defrauds the government for medical insurance benefits is to ensure that those poor enough to qualify for Medicaid and Medicare become addicted to drugs. Many pain management clinics, the worst of which are simply referred to as “pill mills,” don’t need a promise of tennis shoes or boots to lure in poor people, such as the one in which 9 people were arrested in Maryland. According to NBC Washington:
“Owners of the pain management clinics operated them as ?pill mills? and routinely prescribed and distributed oxycodone outside the safe practice of the clinics, said prosecutors. The owners then pocketed the cash from the drug sales, according to prosecutors.
Those indicted also recruited ‘runners’ to visit their clinics, said law enforcement. These ‘runners’ would visit the office, claim false medical needs, fill their prescriptions, and then give the distributors their pills to sell for cash, said law enforcement.”
How does this happen? How is it possible that billions of dollars are being stolen from taxpayers every year from these programs??The Government Accountability Office estimates that:
“there are about $17 billion of improper Medicare payments each year, including fraudulent and erroneous over-payments to health care providers…criminals can rip off federal health care programs simply by carefully filling out and submitting the proper forms, and then the ‘claims will be paid in full and on time, without a hiccup, by a computer, and with no human involvement at all.'”
So while a poor, single mother must disclose every aspect of her life in order to get benefits to ensure she doesn’t get an extra $5 in food stamps she isn’t eligible for, and GOP candidates preach curtailing the luxuries (such as spices and tomato sauce) a welfare recipient should be able to purchase, a computer distributes billions annually to doctors with very little, and sometimes no, oversight.
The next time you overhear a conversation about those lazy welfare queens who are out to defraud the taxpayer, remind the GOP idiot who’s saying it that those welfare queens mostly work in the medical industry.
