Economy $50 Billion in Medicare money are wasted each year to "improper payments".

Arkain2K

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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:

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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So the answer to a government program that wastes “50 billion” due to mismanagement is to create and even bigger program run by the same people who made the original program?
 
So the answer to a government program that wastes “50 billion” due to mismanagement is to create and even bigger program run by the same people who made the original program?

The question you have to ask is does private insurance waste more?

If we went with Medicare for all we would replace private insurance and the amount that comes out of your paycheck to insurance would go to the government.

It's very possible that Medicare is more wasteful than private insurance but without seeing a comparison it's hard to say.

I do know that the government audits hospitals and healthcare providers for Medicare services. This itself could be a waste but I'd like to see a comparison
 
The American people are getting fucked. If you tried to account for every dollar that the government takes in and spends every year I wonder how much is lost, wasted, stolen, misused, etc. How many pockets are padded, pay to play corruption contracts, etc.
 
The question you have to ask is does private insurance waste more?

If "waste" is defined as "improper payments", then private companies will ALWAYS be more mindful about their checkbook than governmental agencies.

The American people are getting fucked. If you tried to account for every dollar that the government takes in and spends every year I wonder how much is lost, wasted, stolen, misused, etc. How many pockets are padded, pay to play corruption contracts, etc.

There's not that many topics that gets my blood boils like when I look at wasteful government spending, which knows no boundaries.
 
If "waste" is defined as "improper payments", then private companies will ALWAYS be more mindful about their checkbook than governmental agencies.



There's not that many topics that gets my blood boils like when I look at wasteful government spending, which knows no boundaries.


Waste should be defined as payments delivered vs services provided.

I'm not really on the UHC side but I'd like to see those stats.

Which system gives the better return on investment? If it's private insurance with Medicare helping out the less fortunate let's keep going with that.

If UHC gives us the same or better coverage at a lesser cost let's go with that.

I really don't care about waste studies that have no comparison
 
Waste should be defined as payments delivered vs services provided.

I'm not really on the UHC side but I'd like to see those stats.

Which system gives the better return on investment? If it's private insurance with Medicare helping out the less fortunate let's keep going with that.

If UHC gives us the same or better coverage at a lesser cost let's go with that.

I really don't care about waste studies that have no comparison

That is why I prefer to have both private and public systems running concurrently. All those questions would be answered within the year.
 
There's not that many topics that gets my blood boils like when I look at wasteful government spending, which knows no boundaries.

Absolutely.

I'm sure it's in the many hundreds of billions range.

It's not just traditional waste but things like how much more effective and efficient can a program, group, project, etc be. How unnecessarily bloated is the staff, budget, project, timeline, etc.
 
That is why I prefer to have both private and public systems running concurrently. All those questions would be answered within the year.

Sure but don't we already have examples of that with states and other countries?

I feel like you're the man to make a thread with all of the studies
 
We need an anti-corruption task force... that is immune to corruption...
 
Medicare's fraud prevention programs take in more than they cost. They could probably be expanded.

However under M4A billing would become much more simple overall. Hospital admin overhead in UHC countries like Canada is half that of the US.

Also is a fallacy to assume private companies are necessarily more efficient when they are incentivised to expand healthcare costs. CEO compensation is tied to it. The amount of the take-home they can spend on paying themselves, advertising etc is tied to it.

The private marketplace benefits from healthcare inflation which is already insane. M4A would be incentivised to control it.
 
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-/
I find that hard to believe since they wouldn't cover my broken finger after they told me over the phone via 2 people 1 regular and the other was the supervisor and they've been sending me a bill for 900$ since july, but somehow they are funding peoples sex changes and hormone therapy
 
Seeing this and your Pentagon thread, I feel a tax waste megathread may be in order?
 
I find that hard to believe since they wouldn't cover my broken finger after they told me over the phone via 2 people 1 regular and the other was the supervisor and they've been sending me a bill for 900$ since july, but somehow they are funding peoples sex changes and hormone therapy
Are you old? Why are you on Medicare
 
Seeing this and your Pentagon thread, I feel a tax waste megathread may be in order?

There are several things that Americans simply have to embrace as long as they keep voting for Democrats and Republicans, for it already became the status quo: Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Tax Waste.

No matter who's sitting in the White House, hundreds of billions of tax dollars went down the drain every single year with utter impunity, absolutely no one who are responsible ever get into trouble for it, and all you're going to see in the mainstream media are utterly pointless shit being rubbed into people's face day in and day out to distract them from the real issues that needs to be addressed.
 
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There are several things that Americans simply have to embrace as long as they keep voting for Democrats and Republicans, for it already became the status quo: Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Tax Waste.

No matter who's sitting in the White House, hundreds of billions of tax dollars went down the drain every single year with utter impunity, absolutely no one who are responsible ever get into trouble for it, and all you're going to see in the mainstream media are utterly pointless shit being rubbed into people's face day in and day out to distract them from the real issues that needs to be addressed.

I don't think there is some kind of agenda or conspiracy to consciously distract from instances of tax waste. Occam's razor would suggest otherwise. I believe that a) there is no culture of accountability, and b) political discussion revolves much more about politicized issues ('Do we need / fund the EPA' is more of a topic of debate than 'Is there waste within the military', even if getting rid of the latter would enable funding the former many times over*).


*Not fact checked, just an example
 
If "waste" is defined as "improper payments", then private companies will ALWAYS be more mindful about their checkbook than governmental agencies.
..........

The problem is that the beneficiaries of the wasted $50 billion are private healthcare industry which don't really want things to change. They want to keep the Medicare golden goose alive which was why they screamed about "death panels" and "killing grandma" during Obama's term. So on one hand they bilk Medicare as much as possible with unnecessary treatments for over 65ers and still they claim that the privatized healthcare system is better than single payer.
 
So the answer to a government program that wastes “50 billion” due to mismanagement is to create and even bigger program run by the same people who made the original program?

I bet Aetna, does 200 billion in fraud a year.
 
So the answer to a government program that wastes “50 billion” due to mismanagement is to create and even bigger program run by the same people who made the original program?
And its still projected to be less expensive than our current system.

The answer is to modernize it. Medicare fraud is a huge issue and always has been. Right now Medicare still relies on a lot of paper filing/ billing.
Updating the program to the 21st century will have to be part of M4A, and it will have to use modern auditing practices.
 
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