How Obama is Paying Off His Pals With Your Medicare
February 4, 2016 By Greg Allen 0 Comments
It’s a well known fact that Obamacare’s biggest cheerleaders were major health insurance companies who salivated at the thought of forcing millions of Americans to buy their product.
Of course, the reality of Obamacare has left many of these big insurers less than happy about their investment in Obamacare.
So, it should come as no surprise to find out that President Obama has found another way to pay off his political allies using someone else’s dime.
In the past several years, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has taken repeated, aggressive actions to limit the ability of auditors to review the payments, for example drastically limiting the number of documents that must be produced by hospitals and other mega-contractors.medicare-fraud
In other words, Obama’s directed his many bureaucratic agencies to hinder efforts to stamp out rampant Medicare and Medicaid fraud and even going so far as to make it easier to milk the taxpayer out of scarce health care dollars.
Unsurprisingly, fraud has exploded under President Barack Obama’s administration. There is an appalling amount of brazen, easily detectable fraud, like “doctors” registering restaurants, convenience stores and airports as the sites of their medical clinics. But the real money is in accounting gray areas that are ruthlessly exploited by many big-name providers.
And real money it is: roughly $60 billion a year, or $114,000 for every minute of every day of the entire year.
This strategy can most clearly be seen in how Obama’s minions have dealt with the only effective way yet found to root out Medicare waste, fraud and abuse.
The Government Accountability Office has been sounding the alarm about this fraud, and even some of Obama’s own top aides have urged in isolation for the agency to implement stronger measures to prevent it. Instead, the agency has worked doggedly to cripple the only deterrent that has shown any efficacy: the Recovery Audit Contractors program.
The “RACs,” as they are called, are paid a portion of the wrongful payments they identify, if those payments are successfully recovered by the government. In other words, unless the agency takes the evidence of the RACs and agrees with their findings, no action is taken against the hospitals.
The program has always been in something like pilot mode, they’ve never been unleashed on the entire pie at CMS, let alone other agencies where the same structure could be successfully replicated.
The problem, at least from the perspectives of a powerful hospital lobby, is the RACs have been too successful at identifying fraud, helping the government claw back over $10 billion in wrongful payments.
That’s right. RAC’s have saved $10 billion in limited and guarded use. Turned loose on the entire federal bureaucracy, imagine how much more would be freed up for people who really need the help.
But that would take away from Obama’s political pals in the insurance lobby so don’t expect much change.
http://senioramericansassociation.com/2016/02/04/how-obama-is-paying-off-his-pals-with-your-medicare/
