It was on 60 Minutes on CBS and all over the news, the daylight robbery that hard-core criminals and softcore con artists perpetrated on the Medicare health insurance system, that acts as a government safety net for the elderly, the poor and the vulnerable. The Department of Justice has made all kinds of arrests over several states for crimes that are as interesting to read as they are chilling. For instance, a doctor in Miami was arrested for running a medical service that was supposed to provide home visits to really sick old people. He was bringing in tens of millions of dollars from the Medicare program every year claiming to be sending nurses on home visits twice a day. He was in cahoots with other clinics in Miami to prescribe a bunch of unnecessary services for the elderly, based on fake medical certificates. There were doctors in Detroit and New York who ran similar scams in billing the government for treating AIDS patients who didn't exist, and trying to help phantom elderly people with physiotherapy.
When scammers like these steal from the government they often think that they are stealing from a large faceless entity; they figure that when Medicare falls short of money, the government will just hand it more. They end up feeling that they are not such bad people, since they are not really taking anything from the poor. But they are in fact taking money from lots of struggling households that are paying taxes. So what was it that tipped the police off in this case?
Well, there are two reasons why the top-off happened now; on the one hand, Obama's health care reform was struggling to find money to pay for everything. His advisers must have told him that they suspected that there was $60 billion worth of fraud perpetrated on the Medicare health insurance system every year. A lightbulb must've gone off in his head when he thought of mopping up all the waste to find legitimate funding for his plan. And then, perhaps as a result of this, there was an investigative piece done in the media about how there certainly had to be something funny going on when in 2008, the County of Miami-Dade received more Medicare funds intended for the very infirm people than the rest of the country combined - more than a half billion dollars. In some cases, doctors roped in elderly patients, to try to get them to act like they were sick, so that they could prescribe expensive and unnecessary tests. Or how about the way they would order expensive specialized medical equipment for patients, but would resell them, and give their patients cheap Chinese versions?
It used to be the Medicare health insurance fraud was something that attracted the educated classes for a little easy money. But this is quickly turning into something that really does need the president's personal attention as it does now. Doctors, homeless people, elderly patients and FBI agents are being threatened for compliance and silence, there are dead bodies turning up everywhere, of people executed mafia-style. The kind of money available for easy pickings in the Medicare scheme makes other hard-core crimes seem like needless exertion. If you were a hard-core criminal trying to run drugs past the border, risking getting shot or captured for life behind bars, wouldn't a mere five-year prison sentence for bilking the Medicare scheme seem much more tempting? Of course it would, especially if it would net one $50,000 in pure profit every day. They go apply for a Medicare supplier license, and just get into business.
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