Big media catches up to Medicare/Medicaid fraud with ’60 Minutes’ expose

Commentary by Kay B. Day

Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum has been outspoken about his opposition to expanding Medicaid. McCollum is running for governor.For more than a year, I’ve written about scammers who defraud government healthcare systems. Fake clinics, fake patients and mobile medical device rip-offs are just a few of the means criminals use to soak the government, and by default, the U.S. taxpayer.  We’re not talking about honest mistakes by established medical facilities. We’re talking about people who see opportunity in a government that hands out money as though it grows on orange trees in our native Florida. The TV program ‘60 Minutes’ finally took a hard look at Medicare and Medicaid scams that make it easy to get fast money by, for instance, setting up a fake clinic with props like a cane, a wheelchair and a nebulizer. Criminals have made a quick $140-150 thousand bucks by doing just that; an interview subject in disguise told the TV show exactly how he and his cohorts did it.

In the state of Florida alone, State Attorney General Bill McCollum said the government may be losing as much as $2 billion healthcare dollars a year, one reason McCollum may be opposing the expansion of Medicaid enrollment as called for in HR 3200, the House healthcare bill many conservatives view as a disaster. McCollum, who is running for governor, has seen the healthcare debacle up close and personal, and he has been vigilant on this and other fiscal matters. Last year, the Medicaid Fraud Control Unit investigated 1,013 complaints and returned approximately $70 million in defrauded funds to the state.

Should a public option pass as Democrats fumble with healthcare ‘reform’, fraud is likely to escalate. Congress has not solved the lack of security on America’s borders, and the current climate provides healthcare to anyone who comes. If you talk to a healthcare worker familiar with maternity wards, you will come to realize the U.S. is a favorite destination for anyone wanting to have a child free of charge, and that child automatically, because of the faulty interpretation of the 14th amendment to the U.S. Constitution, becomes an American citizen. How fast can you say SCHIP?

The maternity racket by the way is just one more gallon in an overflowing bucket of failure in government oversight.

We’ve often written about issues months before big media takes notice. All we can say is it’s about time we confront the reality of taking care of our own citizens with less because we are taking care of the world as well. Medicare and Medicaid fraud will not go away anytime soon. The larger the government becomes, the more vulnerable the infrastructure. That big media has ignored this situation for so long gives an idea of the deterioration of principles journalism once rested upon. Programs like ’60 Minutes’ are just now catching up to an issue we’ve dogged for more than a year,  and we’ve done it with a fraction of the resources big media outlets have.

Big media catches  up to Medicare/Medicaid fraud with '60 Minutes' expose
by Kay B. Day
The US Report (Oct. 27, 2009)