The Atlantic has a good piece eviscerating "government fraud" nonsense

[Recursion]

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/08/everything-you-think-you-know-about-government-fraud-is-wrong/278690/

Thought I would post this for the next round of concern trolls...

And that takes us back to the main point: For the most part, fraud isn’t the product of scheming low-income beneficiaries -- Mitt Romney’s 47 percent -- living high on the hog on your dime, but rather someone other than the beneficiary standing to make a buck off it. Medicare and Medicaid fraud is largely committed not by patients -- very few people are trying to rip off taxpayers to obtain unneeded spinal taps or root canals -- but by providers: unscrupulous (or sometimes just incompetent) doctors and hospitals billing for procedures the patient didn’t need or didn’t receive.

A landmark 2012 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association not only found that fraud rates are consistent across both government programs and wholly private health care; it also concluded that a “less harmful strategy” than the “common” approach “to contain costs us[ing] cuts, such as reductions in payment levels, benefit structures, and eligibility” would be to “reduce waste” -- mostly on the provider side. “The savings potentially achievable from systematic, comprehensive, and cooperative pursuit of even a fractional reduction in waste are far higher than from more direct and blunter cuts in care and coverage.”

Combatting fraud requires efforts and investments that target the real perpetrators, not cheap shots at beneficiaries and reflexive cuts in their programs. There are, after all, equal levels of fraud and theft in other fields, most notably finance -- but we don’t try to reduce it by shutting down the entire industry and blaming the customers.

[LearningCurve]

1. Good piece

The flip side of this though, is that's why certain government programs tend to be safe. Despite all the chest beating, there's too much money to be made.

[silvershadow]

2. If they ever did go after "waste, fraud, and abuse", they'd have to lock up more doctors and

business folk (you know, job creators) than they would patients. But that's just my thought (remembering Rick Scott off the top of my head for example, also an article I read just the other day about that doc who gave chemo to patients who didn't need it).