Waste, Taxes, and an inept congress.

As usual, my friend an colleague Bob Laszewski has it right.

See THIS

From his blog

Most experts estimate that the final health care bill will cost at least $1.2 trillion over those same ten years. It looks like the Democrats are getting ready to propose paying for half the cost of a health care bill with new taxes.

So, out of that $35 trillion we can’t find a little more than a trillion dollars in savings to pay the full cost of a health care bill?

Just taking the $17 billion that government will pay over the next ten years, we can’t find a trillion dollars there either?

Most experts agree that our system costs so much because we waste something like 30% of what we now spend.

At 30% in waste, that would mean that of the $35 trillion we will spend on health care over the next ten years there is more than $10 trillion in waste. Just in the $17 trillion government will spend on health care there would be more than $5 trillion in waste.

Just think about the logic of that for a moment.

It appears we are on our way to a $600 billion to $800 billion tax increase for a health care bill because we can’t find that amount of money in a system that will waste $10 trillion over the same period.

Ridiculous.

For starters, their is an estimated 60 billion in Medicare fraud annually, that the CMS does little, if anything about. They don't report many of their administrative costs, as they want to keep the illusion that their admin costs are under 2%, yet research done shows that their admin costs, without factoring in fraud and abuse, are actually closer to 5.8%. NOW, add in 60 billion. If we were to simply eliminate Medicare fraud, at 60 billion annually, we would save HALF of the money needed for Obama's healthcare reform plans by that action alone. We would save 600 billion over a ten year period. This isn't even touching on the 30% of waste that is estimated to occur in healthcare spending.

It makes me sick. I agree with Bob, these guys are morons. For, instead of actually DOING something to control cost increases, eliminate waste, eliminate fraud (which is illegal anyway), we are going to simply shift the costs to the taxpayer.

The more I see of both parties, the more I realize that they are simply indistinguishable from each other any more. There truly is little if any difference between them. They are concerned only with the accumulation, and maintenance of political power.