Fraud and abuse in America’s healthcare system costs taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars a year – more than enough to pay for high quality private health insurance for every uninsured American. But for whatever reason, Congress ignores this massive pot of money, powerful House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-CA) in particular.
A new Zogby poll asked Americans what is their preferred way to pay for modernizing our healthcare system. Eighty-eight percent said “eliminate fraud” which was well ahead of the second place finisher, “standardize administrative forms” at 77 percent. “Reduce medical errors” was third at 72 percent.
Another new poll by Insider Advantage found 61 percent of respondents said Congress should address the issue of fraud and abuse in Medicare and Medicaid before enacting a new government-run healthcare plan.
That same poll found 41 percent believe there is “significant” fraud and abuse in Medicare and Medicaid with an additional 32 percent saying the problem is “somewhat significant.”
As Chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee Waxman is a key leader in Congress on all matters health. When he led the Committee’s subcommittee on health from 1984-1994, Waxman was responsible for aggressive expansions of Medicaid which are now bankrupting states. Today spending on Medicaid exceeds outlays on K-12 education in most states.
And even as Waxman has championed the massive expansion of government-run health care, he has repeatedly ignored efforts to pursue fraudulent activity in Medicaid – a program over which he has full jurisdiction.
One exception would be his obsession with making sure pharmaceutical innovators are compliant with the prices control regimes he created, even though prescription drugs are an optional benefit in Medicaid and amount to 10 percent of overall costs.
The GAO released a study in January that showed $32.7 billion of Medicaid payments were improper in 2007. It is reasonable to expect the same level of fraud and waste in 2008 and again this year, which would total over $100 billion in just three years. Waxman has still not held a single hearing to investigate this.
In the Democrats’ now-failed $787 billion stimulus bill, Waxman demanded provisions that eliminated citizenship, identity, income, and asset verification requirements for Medicaid enrollees in hopes of ensuring that millions of illegal aliens would receive taxpayer-funded healthcare services. We Americans will post our largest-ever budget deficit this year. And Waxman is determined to spend your money on recipients it was never intended for.
Over his career, Waxman has never missed an opportunity to cut funds for anti-fraud efforts at the Department of Health and Human Services. He has consistently opposed introducing market-oriented competitive bidding in Medicare, which would greatly reduce massive fraud, particularly in the durable medical equipment space.
He also opposes efforts to promote transparency for providers of healthcare services, despite the fact that 98 percent of Americans believe they have the right to know cost and quality information. One would think that making it easier to know which hospital is more likely to kill you would be pretty non-controversial.
Waxman remains a vigorous opponent of account-based plans like Health Savings Accounts and Health Reimbursement Arrangements which are exploding in popularity because they give individuals more control and create the right incentives for smart shopping. Twenty million of these plans exist today because they work.
Eliminating the identity and citizenship requirements for enrolling in Medicaid is a recurring theme with Waxman. He is at it again with his current legislation. His bill would also prevent states from scaling back eligibility for Medicaid whether or not they can or want to afford it in the future. He also bans — yes bans — the purchase of individual private health insurance as of next January.
Waxman and his cronies’ rationalization for government-run healthcare is that it has “low administrative costs” – as if that is a virtue more important than choice in plans and health outcomes produced.
In any case, these programs’ low administrative costs are because they simply pay claims and do almost zero checking into fraudulent activities. Add in rampant fraud and those programs’ administrative costs skyrocket.
And Waxman wonders why he is struggling to pass his bill out of his own committee despite a 13 vote majority.
Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich has published 19 books, including 10 fiction and nonfiction best-sellers. He is the founder of the Center for Health Transformation and chairman of American Solutions for Winning the Future. For more information, see newt.org. His exclusive column for The Examiner appears Fridays. He was asisted with this column by Jim Frogue, vice-president of the center and author of the forthcoming book, Stop Paying the Crooks.
