Four years ago this month, Washington passed a law and named it, with a straight face, the Inflation Reduction Act.
Bizarrely, their plan to ‘reduce inflation’, which had been caused by excessive government spending, was for the government to spend even more money. It’s genius!
Among its various provisions, part of the legislation authorized the government to negotiate prescription drug prices. Seems like a nice idea in principle… but in practice it’s been a disaster.
The Congressional Budget Office released the results late last month: the Medicare drug provisions that were supposed to generate $129 billion in savings will now add $700 billion to the deficit.
Sometimes it seems like this is the whole idea; given the rampant Medicare fraud that gets uncovered on a daily basis, it’s clear that politicians have an incentive to steer MORE money into the program.
Healthcare is the easiest spending in Washington to justify. Every dollar comes with the same argument: if we don’t spend on healthcare, people will die!
It ends up being so much money— a giant, dark pool of corruption— and a lot of it gets funneled straight back into the political process as campaign contributions. And it’s been going on for ages.
Back in 2002, for example, America’s biggest health-care workers union spent about $800,000 electing Rod Blagojevich governor of Illinois. He later thanked them “for electing me governor.”
Weeks after he took office, Blagojevich signed multiple executive orders that fattened the union’s pockets, like forcing more healthcare workers to join… and automatically deducting union dues from their paychecks. Bad for the unionized workers, but great for the union bosses.
In New York, the Greater New York Hospital Association wrote two checks totaling more than $1 million to the state Democratic Party in August 2018, at then-Governor Andrew Cuomo’s campaign’s request.
Three months later the state ordered its first across-the-board Medicaid rate increase since 2008, worth about $140 million a year. Great news for the hospital association.
The cycle never ends— the unions and associations scratch the politicians’ backs, and in turn get their backs scratched. No one can rationally expect those parties to walk away from their mutual benefit.
And this is just the ‘honest’ graft and corruption… it doesn’t take into account the outright fraud.
During COVID, Medicare paid for eight test kits per month, per person, in America. Yet an inspector general later found it paid up to $454 million for nearly 39 million kits over that limit.
Hellbound and Down 