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REP. DARRELL ISSA: The Lackluster Record of Government Health Care: Already Medicare, which acc?

By Glenn Reynolds

REP. DARRELL ISSA: The Lackluster Record of Government Health Care:

Already Medicare, which accounts for 14% of all federal spending, is rife with waste, fraud and abuse. Even Attorney General Eric Holder has said, ?By all accounts, every year we lose tens of billions of dollars in Medicare and Medicaid funds to fraud.?

A recent analysis by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) estimated that federal subsidy programs cost taxpayers about $100 billion every year in improper payments, with Medicare and Medicaid accounting for more than half of that. Harvard Professor Malcolm Sparrow, a specialist in health care fraud teaching at the Kennedy School of Government, has estimated that as much as 20% of the federal health program budgets ? or approximately $150 billion ? is eaten up by improper payments every year.

No budget gimmick can hide that kind of wasteful spending from the American people, and no expansion of the government?s role in health care can mitigate the systemic problems that already exist. . . . Each year, the government spends an average of $927 in administrative costs per person for Medicaid and $509 for Medicare. Private insurance, on the other hand, costs only $453 per person in administrative costs. Until the government can demonstrate an ability to get administrative costs under control for programs that it already runs, Americans should vehemently oppose any effort to give bureaucrats in Washington any more power to control the one-sixth of the U.S. economy that affects health care.

Read the whole thing.

Full post as published by Instapundit.com on March 18, 2010 (boomark / email).