What Medicare and Medicaid fraud cost you, the taxpayer

According to the FBI, Medicare and Medicaid fraud cost the American taxpayer over $80 billion a year.

U.S. Sen. Tom Coburn, a doctor, has taken a leading role in the fight against health care fraud. “Twenty percent of every dollar that’s spent on Medicare goes to fraud,” said Coburn, a Republican of Oklahoma. “And Medicaid isn’t much better. We don’t actually have the numbers because half the states aren’t reporting their Medicaid fraud.”

Other experts believe that the cost of fraud is much higher, amounting to more than $100 billion year. In 2010, Medicare spending alone was $560 billion, and by 2022 that number is projected to be just over $1 trillion. So, if we spend $560 billion on Medicare, according to Senator Coburn’s calculations, that means we spend over $110 billion fraudulently.

Samuel Palmisano, the CEO of IBM, offered the Obama administration a free software program that he promised would cut Medicare and Medicaid fraud by almost $1 trillion and improve the quality and reduce the cost of health care. Yet the Obama administration has yet to make stopping Medicare and Medicaid fraud a priority. Shockingly, the president turned down the offer from Palmisano not once, but twice.

Since when does a government so deep in debt turn down free services that promise to save almost $1 trillion?

On Feb. 28, the FBI announced that it had successfully taken down the largest Medicare fraud scheme to date. This home health care scam, in the Dallas area, was estimated at $375 million. It wasn’t a grand or elaborate scheme. It took only one doctor to certify thousands of faulty Medicare claims in what investigators called a “boiler room”-style medical office. The doctor created fake claims or recruited homeless people to profit from reimbursements when no treatment was actually being administered.

Last year on Long Island, a Riverhead doctor was one of those arrested in a massive nationwide sting operation that uncovered $295 million in fraud.

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand said that Medicare and Medicaid fraud cost state taxpayers over $5 billion per year. Taxpayers in Nassau County alone are being defrauded more than $355 million per year in false Medicare and Medicaid claims.