re: #131 Obdicut

Actually, all you have to do is look at the balance sheets for those publicly traded companies - 10K, etc. and see that they account for fraud and other expenses, and that’s precisely the kind of thing that they look to minimize precisely because eliminating fraud improves the bottom line.

Besides, do you think any private insurer would countenance hundreds of millions a year in fraud let alone billions? Not a chance. They wouldn’t tolerate it in the slightest. Their shareholders wouldn’t stand for it.

There are some metrics that play to levels of fraud and media coverage, but those don’t tell you the dollar values involved. They simply note that Medicare/Medicaid fraud stories appear twice as much as medical false claims.

And the insurance fraud blog notes that insurance fraud in Medicare and Medicaid is $68-220 billion annually.

Others claim anywhere from 3-10% of the nation’s health care spending was fraudulent (lumping public and private)- more than enough to cover all the uninsureds.