SHOCKING AMOUNT of Healthcare Fraud during the Era of Obama
Before we ever needed to consider any healthcare plan, waste and fraud should have been addressed FIRST!
We have the numbers and they are staggering.
Waste and fraud are pervasive problems for Medicare and Medicaid. Improper payments — in the wrong amounts, to the wrong person or for the wrong reason — totaled an estimated $54 billion in 2009. Some of the issues were simple errors, like duplicate billing. Others were elaborate fraud schemes, where people peddled everything from wheelchairs to hospice care.
$54 billion dollars a year is 10 percent of America’s Defense budget or 10 percent of Medicaid’s budget, take your pick. And those are just estimates. The actual numbers are likely far worse.
So, Obamacare was implemented knowing that massive waste and fraud existed. But you won’t believe how the Left spins that. More on that in a bit.
For now, let’s look at some of the fraud uncovered during the Era of Obama.
We learned of one fraud in Oct of 2012.
Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and Attorney General Eric Holder announced Thursday that the Medicare Fraud Strike Force has arrested 91 people for a variety of Medicare billing fraud schemes across seven U.S. cities. The alleged fraud is massive in both scope and breadth, totaling over $230 million in home care billing fraud and $100 million in mental health billing fraud and involving health professionals including doctors, nurses, and various other care providers:
Recall what the website costs were for Obamacare, and you can add that fraud to the bill as well. WaPo wrote a hysterical spin on Obamacare costs.
They tried to limit the losses, but kept offering updates that read like a “Who’s on first?”
Given the vagaries of the federal contracting system, this is not an easy question to answer. But that has not stopped some people from speculating that the total is $500 million or more.
That may be a reasonable figure, but the more we looked into this, the more it seemed a bit high.
However Breitbart put the estimates around $2.1 billion.
The “sell” of Obamacare by the Left was relentless and full of blatant frauds. As The Weekly Standards reported back in 2014:
Remember back when the Democrats tried to sell Obamacare to a skeptical citizenry as health care “reform” that would cost “only” $848 billion—far less than a trillion—over a decade?
As TWT confirms, Obamacare would cost substantially more:
Well, now the CBO is out with a new report on Obamacare’s costs, and—sure enough—its 10-year price-tag now eclipses $2 trillion. To be more exact, the CBO now projects (see Table B-1) that the 10-year gross cost of Obamacare’s coverage provisions will be a cool $2,004,000,000,000.00.
That’s $2 trillion dollars. A far cry from $848 billion.
But don’t fret America, as the CBO came to the rescue and revised the really bad numbers down. As Time reported,
President Obama has touted Affordable Care Act as a way to save money on health care costs. New projections from the Congressional Budget Office, however, anticipate that the federal government will need to spend more on Obamacare than previously thought.
The non-partisan office estimates that the program will cost the federal government $1.34 trillion over the next decade, an increase of $136 billion from the CBO’s predictions in 2015. In 2016 alone, Obamacare will cost a total of $110 billion.
And what of the hidden costs?
Just to administer Obamacare costs billions annually.
Obamacare will be responsible for $273.6 billion in new administrative costs between now and 2022 according to a new report released by Health Affairs Blog. As the researchers note, this means Obamacare overhead accounts for an average of $1,375 per newly insured person per year.
The report notes that overhead of government programs accounts for $101.4 billion while private insurance overhead accounts for the remaining $172.2 billion.
So, every man woman and child enrolled on Obamacare begins with a bill of $1,375 before they ever see a doctor.
And you wondered why the deductibles are so high? People are afraid to go to the doctor due to…COSTS!
According to The Atlantic,
The Affordable Care Act is likely reducing the country’s medical bills. A new report from the Urban Institute provides strong evidence that the law is directly lowering total health-care spending, even as it expands coverage to unprecedented levels. The report shows that projected national spending on medical services, doctors, drugs, and devices between 2014 and 2019 is now $2.6 trillion less than what was projected when the ACA was passed in 2010, and $2.1 trillion less than pre-ACA estimates. Most of this decrease in spending is likely due to external factors such as the sluggish economic recovery—people generally spend less when they have less, even on health.
It should come as no surprise that Americans NEVER supported Obamacare as a majority.
A new CNN Opinion Research poll, conducted over the weekend as the House debated Obamacare, finds that 59 percent of Americans now stand opposed to the health care legislation in Congress. Just 39 percent of the poll’s 1,030 respondents said they favored the bill.
These numbers shouldn’t come as a surprise — even to the White House. In fact, The Washington Post reported this morning that “President Obama is set to begin an immediate public relations blitz aimed at turning around Americans’ opinion of the health-care bill.” The White House plan will be both a short-term strategy to shore up political supporters of the legislation and a long-term effort to bolster Obama’s legacy.
Back to the fraud:
Some irregularities were reported as follows:
The accusations include billing the government for unnecessary ambulance rides in California, writing prescriptions for patients in Dallas who did not qualify for them and paying kickbacks like food and cigarettes to patients in Houston if they attended programs for which a hospital could bill.
The investigation is part of an effort by the Obama administration to find health care savings.”
Medicare billing might as well be a euphemism for “Medicare fraud. Then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch announced this bust back in June 2015.
Nearly lost Thursday in the response to the atrocity in Charleston was Attorney Loretta Lynch’s announcement of arrests in what she called “the largest criminal healthcare fraud takedown in the history of the Department of Justice.” A total of 243 people were arrested and charged with stealing $712 million from Medicare. The arrests included 46 doctors, nurses, pharmacy owners, and other medical professionals. Facilities billed the federal government for therapy sessions where patients were actually just moved, never treated. In a particularly disturbing case, a Michigan doctor allegedly “prescribed unnecessary narcotics in exchange for patients’ identification information, which was used to generate false billings. Patients then became deeply addicted to the prescription narcotics and were bound to the scheme as long as they wanted to keep their access to the drugs.”
Then again, under the watchful eye of Obama, the Feds executed another bust.
As the article describes, this bust was for more false Medicare billings in June of 2016:
Doctors, nurses and pharmacists were among more than 300 charged with health care fraud schemes involving $900 million in false billings in what the Justice Department described Wednesday as the largest such enforcement action in U.S. history.
At least 28 doctors were among those charged with a range of offenses, including conspiracy, bribery, money laundering, kickback violations and identity theft, according to federal documents.
Sixty suspects were allegedly linked to schemes involving the Medicare prescription drug benefit program known as Part D, which is the fastest-growing component of the Medicare program overall.
Leftists claim that Obamacare is the reason the frauds are being detected.
Officials attributed the spike in anti-fraud efforts to new review requirements and data-analysis efforts launched under healthcare reform.
“These efforts are ensuring that only qualified and legitimate providers and suppliers can provider healthcare products and services to Medicare beneficiaries,” CMS said in a memo.
The agency also touted redesigned Medicare statements that will help seniors spot fraudulent billings more easily.
Beneficiaries will receive the documents every quarter and are eligible for rewards in exchange for tips about suspected fraud.
“Unfortunately, there are some people trying to exploit the Medicare system,” said Peter Budetti, CMS deputy administrator for program integrity, in a statement.
The more disturbing trend is what’s happening that destroyed the healthcare system in the first place.
If the Obama administration made fraud its top priority, we might not need such a massive healthcare overhaul. Further, the system appears to have lots of people faking medical needs to get money or drugs.
The latest bust happened during the Trump administration. The government estimates the fraud uncovered totaled $1.3 billion. And you can bet Trump works diligently to keep busting these career healthcare scammers.
One would think addressing fraud should garner bi-partisan support. However, the assholes in Congress refuse to work with him, at least for now.
