Two recent headlines convey a disturbing contradiction: “Medicare fraud: A $60 billion crime” (“60 Minutes”), and “Reid to announce push for public option” (Politico). The former is the latest in a long parade of similar articles about Medicare, the government’s biggest health care program. The latter updates liberal Democrats’ continued effort to expand government health care despite its long and dreary record of waste and fraud.

Indeed, Medicare corruption has been so extensive for so long that the terms “federal health care spending” and “waste, fraud and abuse” are virtually synonyms. In May 1986, for example, Department of Health and Human Services Inspector General Richard Kusserow reported that in the prior six months 65 people were convicted of attempting to defraud Medicare, Medicaid or Social Security, with savings of more than $50 million as a result. During his long tenure as the department IG from 1982 to 1991, Kusserow unearthed hundreds of millions of dollars in fraud and helped gain convictions of thousands of people.