Barack Obama’s Blue Dog Presidency took another step toward Bushist crackpottery yesterday when he actively and enthusiastically reached to to Bushist crackpots by embracing a theme almost as close to their dear little paranoid hearts as voter fraud and SocSec fraud: the supposedly massive fraud in Medicare and Medicaid that has for 30 years been their go-to reason for killing both programs.
President Barack Obama made his case for an overhaul of the U.S. medical system to Missouri voters, emphasizing his efforts to curb waste and fraud in government health programs.
“The health-care system has billions of dollars that should go to patient care and they’re lost each and every year to fraud, to abuse, to massive subsidies that line the pockets of the insurance industry,” he said yesterday at a high school in the St. Louis suburb of St. Charles, Missouri.
Obama is trying to rally public support for the biggest changes to U.S. health care in 45 years in the face of unanimous Republican opposition. He said his proposals show there are ways to pay for expanding insurance coverage to tens of millions of Americans without running up the federal budget deficit.
“So much of the money currently in our health-care system is being misspent,” he said. “If we can have a smarter health- care system, then yes, we can provide help to middle-class folks who need it and, at the same time, actually reduce the burden on taxpayers.”
His spirited endorsement included some of the same probably bogus figures in the charges Republicans have been making for decades – figures they’ve never been able to back up with evidence. The Pres claims he has such evidence through a pilot program in several states.
Last year, the Medicare and Medicaid programs for seniors and low-income Americans made $54 billion in unwarranted payments to healthcare providers, according to White House.
To combat the problem, Obama has proposed expanding a program to reward private bounty hunters who find waste by auditing government payments through what are called “payment recapture audits.”
The White House reported that a pilot program in California, New York and Texas yielded $900 million in Medicare savings between 2005 and 2009.
Gee, I hate to say it but this all sounds very familiar. Isn’t there someone else who used to be president who made unsourced claims based on interior White House studies we never saw that were supposedly prepared by people who were never named?
Whenever FoxNews or George W or Darth Cheney wanted to beef up their credibility when they made incredible statements of fantasy as if they were fact, they, too, would, like, pick a big number – say, a BILLION – and subtract 100 million or so from it so it would sound real. “$897MIL” sounds so much more believable, like numbers were actually crunched to produce it. Except that we would find out months – or years – later that they’d simply made the numbers up, that those “facts” had never existed in the real world.
So before I get all excited about how badly we’re being ripped of by our elderly parents and grandparents, I’d like to a) know who ran this pilot program, b) see the study numbers that reached that conclusion, and c) find out how exactly these paragons of virtue defined “waste”. After all, to a health insurance company any money whatever spent on anybody over 65 is a “waste” since they’re just going to die in a few years anyway.
None of this information was included in either news report. None. Maybe because it doesn’t exist.
Yah think?
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