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The Republican Study
Committee (RSC) has posted two documents that it claims debunks assertions that
there is no waste in Medicaid or the food stamp program, viz., http://johnshadegg.house.gov/rsc/. The documents
themselves, however, tell an entirely different story. A sample of the kinds of
items the documents consist of demonstrates this
conclusively:
The document titled,
Medicaid: Waste, Fraud and Abuse contains these items:
In a recent Florida case, the
owner of a medical billing company was found guilty of over $2.4 million in
health care fraud, specifically in both Medicaid and Medicare. The individual
submitted false claims to Medicaid for both physician evaluations and management
services not actually rendered.
In 2000, the state of Kansas
attempted to estimate the accuracy of its Medicaid payments. They reported an estimated payment
accuracy rate of 76% with a margin of error of Kansas, in 2000, reported an
estimated payment accuracy rate of 9 percentage points. The report outlined commonly identified
errors, such as, claims for treatments and services that were unnecessary or not
covered by Medicaid and over reimbursement for claims.
The document titled, The Food
Stamp Program contains these:
In September 2005, a store
owner pled guilty in a federal court to committing over $1 million in food stamp
fraud and money laundering. An
investigation by the USDA Office of the Inspector General revealed that the
individual illegally obtained over $1.2 million in food stamp benefits in just
five months.
In December 2003, a Chicago
convenience grocery store owner was convicted of food stamp fraud. The owner paid more than $575,000 in
restitution for his actions, which included food stamp trafficking and
laundering, in which he was helping a disqualified food stamp participant
receive profits from food stamp receipts.
The committee seems to be
arguing that a bank, for example, that is the victim of robbery or fraud is
wasteful. The items in the two documents describe not waste but criminal
behavior, and thereby shift the guilt from the perpetrator to the victim, since
the Republican Party advocates more controls on and reduced services in both
Medicare and the food stamp program, which can be likened to telling a bank
which has been robbed to reduce the number of its branch offices. What would
ever lead anyone to believe that if the bank complied, bank robbery or fraud
would decrease?
The RSC's posting of these documents is an exercise in prevarication. Calling a person whose house has been burglarized wasteful is such a deliberate misuse of the English language that it makes one wonder if the writers of these documents are illegal immigrants for whom English is a second language. If they are not, the only conclusion that can be drawn is that they are bald faced liars. (11/30/2005)