Medicare Fraud & Bean

The National Review

A Fraud Exposed — and Ignored

August 10, 2010 3:41 PM

By James C. Capretta

“Law Will Extend Medicare Fund, Report Says,” was the New York Times headline. “Medicare Funds to Last 12 Years Longer Than Earlier Forecast, Report Says,” was the similar take of the Washington Post. Those two stories were upbeat summaries of what the latest report on Medicare’s long-term financial outlook supposedly revealed.

But was that really the most newsworthy headline here?

How about the fact that the person who compiled all of the data for this report, and knows its contents better than anyone else, utterly repudiated its findings?

That’s right. Richard Foster, the chief actuary of the Medicare program and the man responsible for overseeing the production of the data which forms the basis of this annual report’s forecast, has advised the public — in his official “Statement of Actuarial Opinion” printed at the end of the trustees’ report — not to believe any of the modestly rosy conclusions contained within it.

It’s hard to overstate the importance of this development. Here is the president’s point man for assessing the financial status of Medicare declaring that much of the claimed benefits for Medicare from the recently passed health-care law — benefits that the president himself again touted on Saturday — are not to be believed. You’d think it might be news if the top expert in government essentially said the president of the United States was basing his public assertions on one of the most important issues of the day on flawed and misleading data. But apparently not.

Foster and his staff began exposing the fraudulent nature of the Medicare claims months ago. In their April analysis of the final health-care legislation, they agreed with the Congressional Budget Office and every other commonsense person that the same dollar can’t be spent twice. If the Medicare cuts in Obamacare are to be believed (a big “if”), they could be used to improve Medicare’s financial outlook, or to pay for another entitlement program, but not both. But of course Obamacare’s apologists continue to argue that both were financed by the Medicare cuts. The unfortunate consequence of this duplicity is that, eventually, taxpayers will be left holding the bag. At some point, they will be asked to pay higher taxes to finance Medicare spending as well as a new entitlement for health insurance, both of which were supposedly covered by the Medicare cuts.

Best of all Congresswoman Melissa Bean is proud of her vote on the Health Care Bill.

Have you met Joe yet?