Why isn't anyone worried about this huge fraud? Here's why:

"The Bush administration says that last year, 9.3 percent of the claims were paid in error, resulting in overpayments of $19.9 billion to doctors, hospitals and other health care providers."

Now, fact is, if you KNOW the percentage that was paid in error you oughtto be able to track it down and demand its return.

IF, of course, you investigate.

If we had nearly $20 billion a year in fraudulent payments going to poor folks, it'd be a national scandal.

It's true what they say: education pays!

You're correct, qb.

Scams by welfare queens attract less money and more attention than scams by medical providers.

I'm not sure why we should tolerate either one, but surely the attention should follow the money, not the class of the crook. 

We should NOT tolerate either one.

Any speculation on why we tolerate the one we do? 

"Any speculation...?

Well let me just whip it out: politicians don't worry about doctors and health care orgs collecting bogus payments. The people who get the money give their favorite politicians a taste of the loot. That is, the people who collect fraudulent medicare payments make political contributions. Big ones.

Any speculation on why we tolerate the one we do?

Because it's harder to track down.

Some of the fraud is in the margin: as part of a large medical procedure, the patient potentially  needed some small procedure, the stuff was brought out, but not used and returned to stock. The the provider charged as if it had been used.

Some of the fraud is unnecessary procedures. 

And some of it is bald theft, submitting charges for procedures which never occurred, and on behalf of patients who were never seen, and by doctors who aren't.

Tracking this stuff down takes smart people.  The FBI has smart people, but as we see, they basically find medical fraud boring.  If you worked for the FBI, would you like to be assigned to the medical fraud section?

Nonsense, dw.

You're telling us that people holler about "welfare cheats" because they're so easy to detect? And they don't holler about "medicare cheats" because they're so hard to spot?

The question wasn't "Why don't we catch 'em?" It was "Why do we tolerate them?" It's pretty clear there's a big difference in tolerance for one type of cheat over the other.

(Edit: I don't have any tags in this post. Dunno why it's in itals. LATER: Fixed now. Thanks.)

At one level, welfare cheats are in fact quite tolerated.  You got a welfare mother doing some cash babysitting, maybe selling some stuff on eBay for other people, no one's going to be upset.  She's just being entreprenurial, eh?  Lots of people who get off welfare use this path.