California Conservative

All administrations try playing word games to get their agenda passed. Still, It’s important that we not let this word game succeed.

Waste, Fraud and Abuse?

During his address before a joint session of congress, President Obama promised that Medicare benfits wouldn’t decrease even though President Obama proposed a $500,000,000,000 cut in Medicare. President Obama that he’d pay for it by eliminating billions of dollars of wasteful spending. Let’s consider this Evidence A.

Opposite President Obama are the people who say that single-payer is the most efficient system. Single-payer advocates tell us that the overhead on Medicare is significantly less than the overhead that a private insurance company pays. Let’s consider this Evidence B.

If the single-payer supporters are right, then it’s impossible to find $50,000,000,000 of waste per year for a decade. If President Obama is right, then it destroys the single-payers’ argument that it’s the most efficient system employed.

I suspect that both are wrong. I suspect that President Obama isn’t interested in finding any waste in the system. I know that Medicare is a single-payer system and that it reduces its administrative costs through gimmickry:

The ‘Medicare is more efficient than private insurance’ meme is a myth. Dave said that the way that Medicare can say that only 2% of the Medicare budget is spent on administrative costs is because billing is the only thing that’s counted as an administrative costs. Things like processing referrals, doublechecking what was done, whether it’s dispensing medication or IVs or whatever, are counted as patient care.

It’s easy to claim that administrative costs are cheap in single-payer if you hide most of your administrative costs on another line on the balance sheet.

It’s time that the Democrats’ duplicitous explanations got exposed ASAP. It can’t be both filled with waste and be efficient simultaneously. It’s as possible as being in two places at once.

Technorati Tags: Spin, Health Care, Single-Payer, Overhead, Medicare, Budget Cuts, Wasteful Spending, President Obama

Cross-posted at LetFreedomRingBlog

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009 at 7:57 am and is filed under Author: Gary Gross, Health Care, Obama, Special Interests. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.