Economy $50 Billion in Medicare money are wasted each year to "improper payments".

For those who looked far and wide to find the funding for their Medicare-For-All proposal, here's a good place to pick up a cool $50 Billion annually:

https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-...lion-medicare-waste-yes-s-how-much-improper-/

 

So the answer to a government program that wastes “50 billion” due to mismanagement is to create and even bigger program run by the same people who made the original program?

 

The question you have to ask is does private insurance waste more?

If we went with Medicare for all we would replace private insurance and the amount that comes out of your paycheck to insurance would go to the government.

It's very possible that Medicare is more wasteful than private insurance but without seeing a comparison it's hard to say.

I do know that the government audits hospitals and healthcare providers for Medicare services. This itself could be a waste but I'd like to see a comparison

 

The American people are getting fucked. If you tried to account for every dollar that the government takes in and spends every year I wonder how much is lost, wasted, stolen, misused, etc. How many pockets are padded, pay to play corruption contracts, etc.

 

If "waste" is defined as "improper payments", then private companies will ALWAYS be more mindful about their checkbook than governmental agencies.

There's not that many topics that gets my blood boils like when I look at wasteful government spending, which knows no boundaries.

 

Waste should be defined as payments delivered vs services provided.

I'm not really on the UHC side but I'd like to see those stats.

Which system gives the better return on investment? If it's private insurance with Medicare helping out the less fortunate let's keep going with that.

If UHC gives us the same or better coverage at a lesser cost let's go with that.

I really don't care about waste studies that have no comparison

 

That is why I prefer to have both private and public systems running concurrently. All those questions would be answered within the year.

 

Absolutely.

I'm sure it's in the many hundreds of billions range.

It's not just traditional waste but things like how much more effective and efficient can a program, group, project, etc be. How unnecessarily bloated is the staff, budget, project, timeline, etc.

 

Sure but don't we already have examples of that with states and other countries?

I feel like you're the man to make a thread with all of the studies

 

We need an anti-corruption task force... that is immune to corruption...

 

Medicare's fraud prevention programs take in more than they cost. They could probably be expanded.

However under M4A billing would become much more simple overall. Hospital admin overhead in UHC countries like Canada is half that of the US.

Also is a fallacy to assume private companies are necessarily more efficient when they are incentivised to expand healthcare costs. CEO compensation is tied to it. The amount of the take-home they can spend on paying themselves, advertising etc is tied to it.

The private marketplace benefits from healthcare inflation which is already insane. M4A would be incentivised to control it.

 

I find that hard to believe since they wouldn't cover my broken finger after they told me over the phone via 2 people 1 regular and the other was the supervisor and they've been sending me a bill for 900$ since july, but somehow they are funding peoples sex changes and hormone therapy

 

Seeing this and your Pentagon thread, I feel a tax waste megathread may be in order?

 

Are you old? Why are you on Medicare

 

There are several things that Americans simply have to embrace as long as they keep voting for Democrats and Republicans, for it already became the status quo: Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Tax Waste.

No matter who's sitting in the White House, hundreds of billions of tax dollars went down the drain every single year with utter impunity, absolutely no one who are responsible ever get into trouble for it, and all you're going to see in the mainstream media are utterly pointless shit being rubbed into people's face day in and day out to distract them from the real issues that needs to be addressed.

 

medicare/medical same people pay into both, same cess pool

 

I don't think there is some kind of agenda or conspiracy to consciously distract from instances of tax waste. Occam's razor would suggest otherwise. I believe that a) there is no culture of accountability, and b) political discussion revolves much more about politicized issues ('Do we need / fund the EPA' is more of a topic of debate than 'Is there waste within the military', even if getting rid of the latter would enable funding the former many times over*).


*Not fact checked, just an example

 

The problem is that the beneficiaries of the wasted $50 billion are private healthcare industry which don't really want things to change. They want to keep the Medicare golden goose alive which was why they screamed about "death panels" and "killing grandma" during Obama's term. So on one hand they bilk Medicare as much as possible with unnecessary treatments for over 65ers and still they claim that the privatized healthcare system is better than single payer.

 

I bet Aetna, does 200 billion in fraud a year.

 

And its still projected to be less expensive than our current system.

The answer is to modernize it. Medicare fraud is a huge issue and always has been. Right now Medicare still relies on a lot of paper filing/ billing.
Updating the program to the 21st century will have to be part of M4A, and it will have to use modern auditing practices.