Tag: fraud

‘Project Veritas’ Releases New Medicaid Fraud Video

By
Michael F. Cannon

Available here. Something about Medicaid employees coaching faux Russians on how to hide income and assets so as to enroll their father in Medicaid.

I’m not sure how much of what Project Veritas has found counts as fraud. But I’m pretty sure it’s chump change compared to this stuff:

It is interesting, and consistent with the thesis of this video and my National Review article, that Project Veritas’s Medicaid-fraud videos haven’t garnered nearly as much attention as their other “stings.”

Topics: 
General, Government and Politics, Health Care

GAO’s 159th Report on Medicare/Medicaid Fraud Finds Anti-Fraud Measures ‘Inadequate’

By
Michael F. Cannon

Today, the Government Accountability Office will release a new report on fraud in Medicare and Medicaid.  By my count, it is the 159th report the GAO has issued on fraud in these programs since 1986.  According to the Associated Press:

The federal government’s systems for analyzing Medicare and Medicaid data for possible fraud are inadequate and underused, making it more difficult to detect the billions of dollars in fraudulent claims paid out each year, according to a report released Tuesday.

The Government Accountability Office report said the systems don’t even include Medicaid data. Furthermore, 639 analysts were supposed to have been trained to use the system - yet only 41 have been so far, it said.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services - which administer the taxpayer-funded health care programs for the elderly, poor and disabled - lacks plans to finish the systems projected to save $21 billion. The technology is crucial to making a dent in the $60 billion to $90 billion in fraudulent claims paid out each year.

In this article for National Review, I explain that there are reasons why those tools are, and will remain, “inadequate and underused.”

Topics: 
Cato Publications, General, Government and Politics, Health Care

This Week in Government Failure

By
Tad DeHaven

Over at Downsizing the Federal Government, we focused on the following issues this week:

Follow Downsizing the Federal Government on Twitter (@DownsizeTheFeds) and connect with us on Facebook.

Topics: 
Tax and Budget Policy

The Real Scandal of Farm Subsidies

By
Sallie James

When the Washington Post published a story in 2007 about how dead farmers had received farm subsidies to the tune of over $1bn, most people were horrified (even “farm subsidy moderate” Rand Paul thought they should go!). Although the article made clear that “most estates are allowed to collect farm payments for up to two years after an owner’s death,” and that the payments weren’t necessarily fraudulent, outrage ensued.

But a follow-up investigation by the USDA has found that all but about $1 million of the payments were completely above board. From the Associated Press:

A 2007 report that the federal government had paid $1.1 billion in subsidies to dead farmers sparked an outcry and has been frequently cited by critics who considered the payments a blatant example of wasteful spending. But a follow-up that found no fraud and determined nearly all the subsidies paid on behalf of dead farmers in recent years were proper has received little attention.

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Farm Service Agency, just a little over $1 million out of the billions of dollars paid in subsidies in 2009 went to estates or business entities that weren’t entitled to them.

“Very little money is going to individuals who have not earned that money. Very little is being paid in error because a farmer has passed away,” FSA Administrator Jonathan Coppess told The Associated Press. [emphasis mine]

Don’t you just love how Mr Coppess uses the word “earned” there?

That’s the real scandal of farm subsidies, readers. Not that they are fraudulent (although that is of course an outrage), but that they are, for the most part, perfectly legal.

Topics: 
Tax and Budget Policy, Trade and Immigration

How Gov. Cuomo Can Fix New York’s Budget Mess

By
Michael F. Cannon

New York’s budget problem is actually a Medicaid problem.  In Sunday’s New York Post, I offer advice to New York Governor Andrew Cuomo (D) on how to fix a budget gap that will grow to $17 billion during his term:

Gov. Cuomo can’t fix Medicaid by himself. He needs the help of Congress.

There is a solution…

Block grants are how President Bill Clinton and a Republican Congress reformed welfare back in 1996, to spectacular success. Welfare reform forced New York to be smarter about welfare spending, just as a block grant would force New York to rededicate Medicaid to its original mission — providing necessary medical care to the truly needy.

There’s one place Gov. Cuomo can start on his own: Close the loopholes that allow well-to-do New Yorkers to feign poverty on paper so that Medicaid underwrites their long-term care. Medicaid exists for the poor, not to help well-off baby boomers protect their inheritance.

Steve Moses of the non-partisan Center for Long-Term Care Reform recommends that Cuomo take steps to ensure that New Yorkers with means pay for their own long-term care. These include reducing New York’s home-equity exemption from $750,000 to $500,000 (and seeking a federal waiver to reduce it to $0), expanding the use of liens and estate recovery and ending the abusive practice of “spousal refusal.”

Reducing Medicaid abuse won’t be easy. But Cuomo doesn’t have much choice.

In fact, what he has is an opportunity to become the leading national spokesperson for block grants, the quickest and easiest course to relief for states toiling under the unsustainable yoke of Medicaid spending.

For more on Medicaid reform, click here.  For more on abuse of Medicaid’s long-term care subsidies, click here.

Topics: 
Health Care, Tax and Budget Policy

Government Program Immortality

By
Chris Edwards

Who said: “A government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth.”?

As political junkies know, that was Ronald Reagan at the 1964 Republican convention. The Internet attributes other similar quips to Reagan.

Reagan apparently borrowed the idea from Senator James F. Byrnes, who stated on the floor of the Senate in 1933: “The nearest earthly approach to immortality is a bureau of the federal government.”

My source is “Reorganization of Federal Administrative Agencies,” Congressional Quarterly, September 17, 1933. The article is a reminder that concerns about government waste, duplication, overlap, and inefficiency certainly did not start with Reagan. Government failure has been around a long time.

The CQ article notes that the 1932 Democratic platform called for “an immediate and drastic reduction of governmental expenditures by abolishing useless commissions and offices, consolidating departments and bureaus, and eliminating extravagance, to accomplish a saving of not less than 25 percent in the cost of the federal government.”

Alas, that leaner-government policy was not exactly the approach followed by FDR.

Topics: 
Government and Politics, Political Philosophy, Tax and Budget Policy

Halloween: Uncle Sam Style

By
Tad DeHaven

The Office of Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) has released an appropriately timed report on federal subsidies that have gone to the deceased. From the introduction:

In the past decade, Washington sent over $1 billion of your tax dollars to dead people. Washington paid for dead people’s prescriptions and wheelchairs, subsidized their farms, helped pay their rent, and even chipped in for their heating and air conditioning bills.

In some cases, these payments quietly gather in a dormant bank account. In many others, however, they land in the pockets of still-living people, who are defrauding the system by collecting benefits meant for a now-deceased relative.

Since 2000, the known cost of these payments to over 250,000 deceased individuals has topped $1 billion, according to a review of government audits and reports by the Government Accountability Office, inspectors general, and Congress itself. This is likely only a small picture of a much larger problem.

As a Cato essay on fraud and abuse in federal programs discusses, these problems are endemic because the federal government is a “vast money transfer machine.” While federal subsidy programs should be cut because they harm the economy and are unfair to taxpayers, Coburn’s findings of pure waste represent one more reason to pursue terminations of federal programs.

Topics: 
Tax and Budget Policy

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