Medicare's Wasted Billions : Who Cares?

The question here is why an effort is not made to recover the ill-gotten funds? Why did the duck cross the road? I don't know. Maybe it has something to do with politics? Maybe by allowing the waste to continue more and more people benefit from having a government that is totally out of control? And so why not vote to have it continue out of control. The more democrats that are voted in, more waste and fraud is assured.

Electing politicians that promise to take away the gravy train isn't in the best interest of those that are stealing us blind.

Medicare Program Overpaid Billions Last Year
Source: Rob Garver, "Medicare Execs Are Overpaying $35 Billion a Year...And They Don't Seem to Care," Fiscal Times, January 21, 2014.
January 27, 2014

Medicare's Private Fee-For-Service Plans overpaid $34.6 billion in 2013, says the Fiscal Times.

• Medicare's Fee-For-Service (FFS) program alone has a 10.1 percent "improper payments" rate, and it is only one of several government programs that have wasted billions of dollars each year.
• More than $100 billion is wasted annually by 13 of the largest federal programs.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which runs the FFS program, can recover these overpayments when they try -- in fact, they recovered 83 percent of funds they identified as having been paid improperly. However, CMS only identifies 0.1 percent of improper payments each year. That's only one one-thousandth of the total amount.

• To get a sense of just how much money the FFS program overpaid last year alone, $34.6 billion is nearly equal to the entire Department of Justice budget.
• In fact, those wasted funds could have funded the Department of Commerce, the Environmental Protection Agency, all civil works projects by the Army Corps of Engineers, and the National Science Foundation combined, and there would still be $1 billion left over.

With the proven ability to recover overpayments, it is puzzling that more effort is not being made to recover the rest of the funds.