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It is probably possible to make an at least noticeable difference in the medicare/medicaid bill by cracking down on fraud, without reducing coverage, just because outright billing fraud is so common. Remember, these are single payer healthcare, not single provider, and the payer is well known for always paying. For for profit healthcare providers, that's tempting.
A bunch of the somalis convicted of that $250,000,000 COVID child food aid fraud had also been conning Medicaid for "adult daycare services." Some of them were still being paid for running non-existent daycares even after their fraud convictions!
It hasn't made the news much, but there's billions of dollars of theft out there.
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Medicare fraud is extremely common. There are entire companies that just ship wildly expensive, random "medical equipment" (which is usually some kind of actual equipment, like a back brace or something) to old people and charge it to Medicare on their behalf, and then just see if the octogenarians can figure out how to file a return through their Byzantine phone trees or website.
What’s Musk’s plan to stop that, though? Seems like that would require (as the IRS did when it seriously stepped up pursuit of tax evasion) many more staff, more audits, more money.
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