The Black Informant | African American Commentary, News and Community Building

Although this article is quite lengthy, it gives a pretty detailed overview on the current state of government-sponsored healthcare.

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How to Stop Medicaid Fraud

Steven Malanga

For starters, states should try.

For more than a decade, Medicaid has been the fastest-growing item on many state budgets. Unfortunately, state and federal efforts to uncover and stamp out the astonishing amount of fraud in the program (whose costs the states split with Washington) have lagged. Experts estimate that abuses of Medicaid eat up at least 10 percent of the program’s total cost nationwide—a waste of $30 billion a year. Unscrupulous doctors billing for over 24 hours per day of procedures, phony companies invoicing for phantom services, pharmacists filling prescriptions for dead patients, home health-care companies demanding payment for treating clients actually in the hospital—on and on the rip-offs go. The cheating is brazen because scam artists have figured out that years of lax oversight have made Medicaid easy plunder. (more…)