A fantastic video based on this fantastic article by Jonathan Rauch:

And it would work like this, if the government made travel arrangements for one third of the population and penalized anyone else who didn’t let an employer make theirs.

USA Today’s Kelly Kennedy is going to town on Medicare & Medicaid fraud. Today, she writes:

In California, as English-as-a-second-language Medicare recipients line up for other services, a person will approach them in line and “They’ll say, ‘The government would really like for you to have a wheelchair,’ ” said Julie Schoen, director of special projects for California’s Senior Medicare Patrol. Then, she said, the scammer will take the Medicare recipient to a “clinic” for an exam.

The patient will often receive a wheelchair, but not a motorized wheelchair worth about $3,600 for which Medicare will be billed, Schoen said…

“It’s a big problem,” Schoen said. “The scammers really know how to do it well, but the guy with Parkinson’s who needs a chair has to fight for it.”…

In South Dakota, people fall victim to television ads, said Melissa Wood, program director for Senior Medicare Patrol in South Dakota. The ads show seniors using electric wheelchairs to fish or visit a shopping mall, and tell them that, as Medicare recipients, they qualify for free.

“The people have no idea it’s fraudulent,” Wood said. “I think in the past year or so, it’s picked up because of all the advertisements.”

The scammers also collect people’s Medicare numbers, which they then use fraudulently or sell to another company to use, Wood said.

But never fear. Your trusty public servants are on the job:

The federal government is cracking down on medical-equipment providers who either overcharge Medicare for motorized wheelchairs or obtain them for people who don’t need them, Medicare and Justice Department records show.

Medicare plans to almost triple the number of anti-fraud strike forces it operates nationwide, from seven to 20, U.S. Health and Human Services Department budget documents show.

Almost triple! Too bad fraud experts say Medicare would have to increase its anti-fraud efforts 10- or 20-fold to address fraud in a serious way.

Congress will never do that, of course, because the game is rigged — not just to allow fraud, but to protect fraud.

That’s the title of this week’s column for Kaiser Health News. An excerpt:

As luck would have it, we have a home-grown model for Medicare reform that would contain spending and improve the quality of care. This model appeals to both Republican and Democratic ideals: it satisfies the Republican desire for individual ownership and control, but emulates a social insurance program revered by Democrats. The key to improving health care for seniors is … to make Medicare look more like Social Security.

With this column, I have finally managed to work my favorite Seinfeld quote into my professional writing.

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.”

Here’s why.

Or at least, that’s what The Daily Caller says a Republican pollster says:

A year may have passed since Obamacare passed, but conservatives are still angry as hell about it.

Expect the legislation to play a large role in the 2012 elections, according to John McLaughlin, who recently conducted a series of focus groups for the research group Resurgent Republic. The group is run by some of the country’s best-known Republicans.

“My guess it it’s going to be a big election issue next year,” McLaughlin said in an interview…

When it comes to President Obama’s health care law among these voters, the perception of these voters has hardly changed: the intensity remains strong and they still want it repealed, McLaughlin said.

ObamaCare’s overall numbers don’t look any better, either.

Matt Yglesias writes:

a new rigorous study from Oregon confirms that Medicaid does, indeed, save lives

As The Atlantic’s Megan McArdle writes: “This is exactly what the study does not find.” Like McArdle, I read the study, and can confirm this. Or perhaps Yglesias can direct us to the part of the study where he read that.…

If Yglesias could see in this rigorous study something that isn’t actually there, does that mean there’s a chance that the motivations he assigns to ObamaCare opponents — they “want to deny life-saving medical care to the poor” — may not comport to reality either?