Waste Fraud And Abuse
I remember reading in Time in the 60s how medical inflation was 5% a year and something had to be done. Now with government involved it is growing at a more reasonable rate of 10% a year.
Drs. are leaving the field because every government patient they see costs them $20.
To prevent waste, fraud, and abuse, reimbursement paperwork takes up 40% of a Drs. time.
You want lower cost health care? Get the government out.
Obama is right: government hasn't delivered. What he and his fellow liberals fail to see is that it can't.
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"To prevent waste fraud and abuse, reimbursement paperwork takes up 40% of a Drs. time."
For gov't work, that's pretty good. In the military, we had systems in place that probably cost about $1,000 for every $100 that we "saved." At that rate, we could have bankrupted the country by saving it a few billion dollars.
I always particularly enjoyed the full-blown Financial Liability Investigation of Property Loss and 15-6 Investigation for equipment clearly destroyed by enemy action. It was reassuring to know that the bean counters were looking out for the taxpayer's dollar and doing the full investigation to ensure that we weren't deliberately blowing ourselves up in order to waste money from the latest supplemental. That was an especially joyful bit of bureaucratic stupidity at a time and place that made it all the more appropriate and worthwhile.
I remember the $200 hammer flap.
What the whiners in Congress never mentioned is that the hammer cost $200 due to gov. procurement regulations.
I worked for a defense contractor and the AF called and wanted some special stainless steel bolts for a piece of eqpt we made. We offered to give them to the AF for free as a gesture of good will.
The AF said they need the certification papers and all the paper work that normal procurement required. The price went up to $600 because we followed gvmnt. procurement and pricing rules.
I remember that when I told people that the hammers cost $200 because of Congress there was hardly any interest.
But to prevent a repeat Congress quietly passed rules giving base commanders discretionary funds. That was one problem they didn't want to see again.
A close friend took a job with Electric Boat after graduation. His first assignment was on the Thresher investigation team. He used to joke about having to do his own secretarial work and hand carry coordination documents from New England to the Pentagon because the procurement regs would pay his salary as an engineer, but the secretarial work and courier service were considered company overhead. I imagine security issues impinged along the way, though.
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