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

To: Little Joe who wrote (149717)	11/11/2010 10:34:03 PM
From: JohnM	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541824

I pointed out that there is huge fraud which is not a part of those costs. But you've not been able to quantify it enough to make the case. Nor can you. The amount of that fraud is an unknown, speculated upon, guessed at, but not known. At least not enough to know what the costs might be. To make the case, seriously, would require knowing a great deal more as to just how "administrative" costs are determined and how the overall costs are calculated. So you've got an hypothesis and some anecdotal evidence. I also provided some articles that questioned whether those administrative costs were as low as claimed. See above. It's easy to raise questions; hard to do more. As for fraud in the private system, I'm only pointing out that we don't know how much exists. There's little doubt that it exists. Just no idea how much. So we've got rumors of fraud, lots of talk of fraud, in medicare, with no way to really quantify it, and thus no serious way to know how it relates to "administrative" costs. I'm still sticking with Ezra Klein's numbers and analysis until I see something better. His work is not only good; that particularly piece, the one Wharfie posted, is a near model.