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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lane3 who wrote (60101)	4/19/2008 6:08:13 PM
From: Katelew	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 543119

The fraud is not with Medicare per se, it's with nursing homes, hospitals, and to a much lesser extent, docs. Nursing homes and hospitals are notorious for slapping anything they want onto the bills they send in. In terms of people, like all government agencies, cuts in personnel prevent the kind of watchgogging that needs to go on. So only the huge, eggregious cases of fraud get turned up. I've seen estimates that over 100 billion more a year could easily be gotten by the IRS with additional staff. The total could be as high as 3-400 billion a year. For example, the Fed. Govt. needs an electronic system by which an individual tax return can be cross-checked against the amount of sales tax that person reports on their business to their state of residence. This could pretty easily and cheaply be done, and if people knew it was there they'd even be frightened into reporting more honestly. There are similar proposals that just the existence of would scare small business owners. The only people that are paying taxes honestly are salaried employees. It's an honor system pretty much with everyone else.