To Save America: Stopping Obama's Secular-Socialist Machine (26 page)

 

Move from paper-based care to modern, electronic tools. The 2009 stimulus allocated tens of billions of dollars toward encouraging physicians and providers to adopt twenty-first century tools such as electronic prescribing and electronic health records. While I opposed the inclusion of this investment in the stimulus bill, these are valuable tools nonetheless. We have a new book at the Center for Health Transformation entitled
Paper Kills 2.0
, edited by David Merritt, that proves conclusively that technology saves lives and money. Updated, accurate, and comprehensive patient information at the point of care will prevent medical errors and will allow physicians, nurses, and providers to make better, more informed decisions. Electronic access to information will reduce duplicative
and unnecessary tests and treatments. Automating cumbersome, manual processes will streamline workflow, eliminate inefficiencies, and lower costs. We must continue striving to get these technologies into the hands of doctors and nurses and to ensure that information is portable, accurate, secure, and protected.

The solutions presented here can be the foundation for an individual-centered system. We must insist that our elected leaders have the courage to embrace them.

President Obama’s healthcare reform will raise taxes, destroy jobs, and allow Washington bureaucrats to make decisions that ought to be made by individual Americans together with their families and doctors. At a time when we are already suffering from over-taxation, high unemployment, and excessive regulation, it’s the last thing America needs.

We can create a better system, one that prioritizes individual health and wellness, delivers personalized, best practice care, and insures every American. The changes and solutions outlined in this plan are the right reforms to build such a future. By addressing health, quality, costs, and coverage:

The choice is clear. We can implement transformative programs—for better health, more efficient delivery, sound public programs, and a competitive marketplace—that will assure that all Americans have access to quality healthcare that is available, affordable, and appropriate. Or we can accept the left-wing approach of ushering in a government-run system that will destroy our economy along with our health.

The choice is ours—and the time for choosing is now.

We should repeal the 2010 big-government act passed on a narrow partisan basis with extraordinary corruption and bribery, and start over in the right direction with the right policies.

With Jim Frogue, Vice President of the Center for Health Transformation and Editor of
Stop Paying the Crooks

 

 

 

E
very year we taxpayers pay $70-120 billion to crooks through Medicare and Medicaid alone. This ought to be the first source of new money to pay for health reform.

Why raise taxes on honest people or cut health benefits for honest senior citizens or penalize honest doctors and hospitals when the system is run so incompetently that it currently gives billions to criminals every month?

This problem is so great that at the Center for Health Transformation, we have initiated an entire antitheft and antifraud project led by Jim Frogue, the coauthor of this chapter.

Fraud, waste, and abuse in our healthcare sector are more pervasive than people think—they constituted a third or more of the $2.5 trillion spent on healthcare services in 2009. To his credit, President
Obama noted in his September 9, 2009 address to Congress there are “hundreds of billions of dollars in waste and fraud” in the system.

Other top officials and representatives have drawn attention to the problem as well. Health and Human Services secretary Kathleen Sebelius said at the January 28, 2010 National Summit on Health Care Fraud, “We believe the problem of healthcare fraud is bigger than government, law enforcement, or private industry can handle alone.”

At the White House Health Summit on February 25, 2010, Senator Tom Coburn suggested, “20 percent of the cost of government healthcare is fraud.” Senator Chuck Schumer of New York later responded, “I was glad to hear my friend Tom Coburn’s remarks. I think we agree with most of them, and particularly the point that about a third of all the spending that’s done in Medicare and Medicaid . . . doesn’t go to really good health care, goes to other things.”

Unfortunately, while clearly aware of this debilitating problem, Congress and the administration have not developed meaningful proposals to solve it. But this is an urgent issue requiring fast, effective action.

According to an October 2009 white paper by Thomson Reuters, the overall American healthcare system wastes $600-850 billion
every year.
Here’s the breakdown:
¹

Additional confirmation of the scale of fraud and waste comes from the Government Accountability Office (GAO), widely regarded as the gold standard for investigating government-run programs. In a January 2009 report on “high risk” programs, GAO experts found in 2007, the Medicaid improper payment rate was 10 percent, or $32.7 billion (FN).
²
This contrasts with the average improper payment rate of 3.9 percent across all government programs, according to the Congressional Research Service.
³

So Medicaid has nearly three times the improper payment rate of all government. That is one reason the Left can tout low administrative costs for Medicare and Medicaid: they simply write checks without effective oversight. They pay more in fraud than they gain in lean administration.

In the Senate Finance Committee, Republican John Cornyn submitted an amendment to the Senate healthcare bill that made expansion of the Medicaid program contingent on GAO certifying that Medicaid’s improper payment rate was at or below the government average. The amendment was defeated on a party-line vote.

Consider this: the federal department that oversees Medicaid
cannot even accurately measure
the extent of the problem. A letter dated August 26, 2009, from Stuart Wright with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General to Cindy Mann, Director of State Operations at the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), outlined how current data collection methods fail to generate accurate and timely data about the program. As the old saying goes, “You can’t manage what you can’t measure.” The conclusion to the 25-page letter reads:

Medicare’s improper payment rate is equally bad. A November 2009 report admitted to $47 billion in improper payments, which is, like Medicaid, roughly 10 percent of that program. Examples included payments to dead doctors and people using Medicare ID numbers with or without the beneficiary’s knowledge to run up fake billing.
⁵

An excellent segment on
60 Minutes
in October 2009 estimates $60 billion of Medicare spending annually is fraudulent. Steve Kroft warns in the opening that the show will “make your blood boil.” The highlight of the piece is an interview with a convicted Medicare fraudster who explains how easy and lucrative it is to steal from Medicare. He made $20,000 to $30,000 a day, and he assures Kroft that, though he is behind bars, there are thousands of people like him stealing from the program.
⁶
Consider this sampling of recent fraud in our healthcare system:
^g