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For those who looked far and wide to find the funding for their Medicare-For-All proposal, here's a good place to pick up a cool $50 Billion annually:
https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-...lion-medicare-waste-yes-s-how-much-improper-/
At a town hall in New Hampshire, U.S. Rep. Tim Ryan of Ohio, one of the many Democrats running for president in 2020, was asked how he would stop the federal government from wasting taxpayer money.
"This has got to be a major initiative for Democrats; we don’t talk enough about waste in the government," Ryan replied. "If you look at the Medicare program, for example, there is $50 billion a year wasted in the Medicare program. That’s a billion dollars a week."
Under federal law, an improper payment is one "that should not have been made or that was made in an incorrect amount, including overpayments and underpayments." These could range from coding errors in the billing process to fraud, such as companies billing Medicare for services that were never provided.
Malcolm Sparrow, a professor of the practice of public management at Harvard, said that in a general, non-technical sense, Ryan’s claim is accurate. He added that the audit protocols that Health and Human Services uses to produce the estimates are weak, "so the actual levels of overall waste, or overpayments, are undoubtedly much higher than these government estimates."
Joseph Antos, a Medicare expert at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, offered a different view. The real waste, he said, is not what is measured by the improper payment estimates, but Medicare providing services that aren’t necessary, or aren’t delivered well, such as poor follow-up after a patient is hospitalized, resulting in that patient having to return to the hospital.
In the past two years, the federal agency that administers Medicare reports that $52 billion and then $48.5 billion in "improper payments" were made — ranging from payments made with bookkeeping errors to fraud.
https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-...lion-medicare-waste-yes-s-how-much-improper-/
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