Feds run Medicare and we Lose BILLIONS every year

REP. DARRELL ISSA: The Lackluster Record of Government Health Care:

Already Medicare, which accounts for 14% of all federal spending, is rife with waste, fraud and abuse. Even Attorney General Eric Holder has said, “By all accounts, every year we lose tens of billions of dollars in Medicare and Medicaid funds to fraud.”

A recent analysis by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) estimated that federal subsidy programs cost taxpayers about $100 billiion , with Medicare and Medicaid accounting for more than half of that on every year in improper payments. Harvard Professor Malcolm Sparrow, a specialist in health care fraud teaching at the Kennedy School of Government, has estimated that as much as 20% of the federal health program budgets – or approximately $150 billion – is eaten up by improper payments every year.

No budget gimmick can hide that kind of wasteful spending from the American people, and no expansion of the government’s role in health care can mitigate the systemic problems that already exist. . . . Each year, the government spends an average of $927 in administrative costs per person for Medicaid and $509 for Medicare. Private insurance, on the other hand, costs only $453 per person in administrative costs. Until the government can demonstrate an ability to get administrative costs under control for programs that it already runs, Americans should vehemently oppose any effort to give bureaucrats in Washington any more power to control the one-sixth of the U.S. economy that affects health care.


via Instapundit

Obama lied, the poor and elderly will die, with or without Obamacare

Medicare facing cancer, cardiac care cuts

Reimbursements for oncologists and cardiologists are on the federal government's chopping block in the next six weeks.


If enacted as scheduled on Jan. 1, 2010, policy changes recommended by the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) -- the government's insurer for the elderly and disabled -- will severely cut current Medicare reimbursements to cardiologists and oncologists for critical care services that are provided to patients in physicians' offices or other out-of-hospital setting, such as chemotherapy to treat cancer, and various cardiac procedures to monitor and treat heart disease, such as nuclear imaging and heart catheterization.

These cuts will force cardiologists and oncologists to limit care to their Medicare patients, withdraw from treating Medicare patients altogether or require their patients to pay more out of pocket to make up the difference in the cost of these services.

Unless these proposed changes are rescinded, current and future cardiac and cancer care patients will suffer the consequences, especially in rural areas where the proportion of Medicare patients is exceptionally high and patients have fewer choices of health care providers.

via instapundit

Don't expect to read about this in the Post or the Times

Obama wants to Slash $1.4 Billion From Medicare

Obama slashes Medicare in 2010 for Heart, Cancer Docs

Bloomberg News reports that President Obama has proposed cutting $1.4 billion in Medicare payments to heart and cancer specialists.

Washington Post still focused on McDonnell