Loose with numbers: Medicare fraud report a fiction
I haven't watched CBS' "60 Minutes" in years. But it was one of those stories that stops you in your tracks: Medicare fraud is "a $60 billion crime."
[ ]...McCaleb and the attorney general were wrong, too. GAO has never estimated total Medicare fraud. It investigates targeted programs within Medicare, finding fraud in the millions, not billions. And it's not total federal expenditure that those estimates McCaleb referred to are based on. It's total public and private expenditure on health care. The National Health Care Anti-Fraud Association, a partnership between private insurers and the federal government, says that it "estimates conservatively that 3 percent of all health care spending -- or $68 billion -- is lost to health care fraud." The association bases that figure on 2007 total health care spending of $2.27 trillion in the United States. It's an unscientific, very dubious way of making estimates. But even if you go with it, well over half that spending is private sector.
Also, our deepest sympathies to the pathetic Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, Michelle Malkin, former House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-Texas) and GOP presidential hopeful for 2012 Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty that they endorsed a rightwing conservative nut job that lost and this special election was in no way a referendum on Obama or Democrats.
