It’s In Their Genes
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies. Groucho Marx
Like good little stenographers, the Pensacola News Journal printed Florida’s Senate Temp’s newsletter. Unfortunately, Temp Lemieux felt compelled to do something so his name would appear on the records of the Senate. He has decided that Medicare fraud is totally out of control according to his unsourced [LeMieux Targets Health Care Fraud estimates?] statistics, so he wants to create a new bureaucrat, “Chief Health Care Fraud Prevention Office – a person within the Department of Health and Human Services whose sole job will be to prevent fraud”.
Real slowly – Fraud is a crime. Crimes are dealt with by the Department of Justice, not the Department of Health and Human Services. HHS is the victim in Medicare fraud. Victims don’t investigate and prosecute crimes as they tend not to be impartial.
If he wants to do something he could push to increase funding for the fraud unit at the US Attorney’s Miami office, as, for some reason, there is an awful lot of Medicare fraud in South Florida. In addition to pursuing existing Medicare fraud cases, the unit is also involved in investigating and prosecuting Charlie Crist’s political donors list, so they are busy and could use the help.
A fun note: You may remember the LOLCat picture that I used when the Temp was appointed. I happened upon the original at a knitting site with the instructions for making the hat which is called the Le Mieux.
4 comments
I am unaware of any studies which show Medicare is defrauded with any greater frequency than private insurers. Fraud is fraud. Whether it is Medicare or Blue Cross being defrauded should make about as much difference legally as the number of herring I had for lunch today, except that generally Medicare fraud is going to be prosecuted by the Feds and Blue Cross fraud is going to be prosecuted by the state.
Generally a victim has to report a crime before there is an investigation, and Medicare clearly needs to discover and report that they are being defrauded to the proper prosecuting agency, but clearly they already have something along those lines given the number of Medicare fraud cases that have been successfully prosecuted over the past few years…
Just more grandstanding by a Republican dipstick who doesn’t know his talking end from his taking-a-dump end… what else is new?
– Badtux the Healthcare Penguin
.-= last blog ..Free market snake oil =-.
There is an existing task force on Medicare fraud that just made arrests in multiple different schemes, so the problem is definitely being addressed.
HHS doesn’t even see the paperwork that would have to be scanned to detect fraud, that’s handled by CMS on contract.
Most fraud investigations are started when someone complains that they didn’t need or receive something on their use report, or if the ID number isn’t valid, usually because someone has died. [You would be surprised at how active dead people are in South Florida – they vote, they get mobility equipment, all kinds of things. Maybe it’s all the Haitians creating zombies 😈 ]
South Florida sounds a lot like Chicago or New Orleans. Why deprive people of the right to vote just because they’re dead, after all? 😉
.-= last blog ..The war on drugs =-.
That is certainly the attitude of the local Miami pols. After all, if they didn’t want them to vote why hold elections so close to El Día de los Muertos?