Nancy-Ann DeParle, She Knows Medicare Fraud - From WSJ.com's Political Diary

Obama's Expert on Medicare Fraud

It turns out that President Obama's Health Care czarina, Nancy-Ann DeParle, knows a lot about all that Medicare waste, fraud and abuse that Mr. Obama wants to weed out.
Mr. Obama says he can free up $500 billion to pay for an expanded middle-class health care entitlement by eliminating waste and fraud in Medicare. Many are skeptical, but at least he has an underling who knows all about the subject.

Ms. DeParle ran the Medicare program under Bill Clinton, then left to serve on the boards of several medical care companies that later were charged with Medicare fraud. Five of the companies subsequently paid out $566 million in fraud or product liability settlements, with Medicare often being the victim of the alleged fraud. Meanwhile, she earned millions of dollars in board fees.

We can thank Investigative Reporting Workshop of the American University School of Communication for this information. It conducted a multi-month investigation. In one case, Ms. DeParle joined the board of Specialty Laboratories Inc., a California medical testing company, just two months before "federal investigators suspended Medicare payments and threatened to revoke Specialty's license to operate. The company agreed to pay a $700,000 fine. . . . Specialty was also sued this year by the state of California which seeks to recover hundreds of millions of dollars for the state's Medicaid program for what [California Attorney General Jerry] Brown termed 'massive . . . fraud and kickbacks' over the past 15 years."

One should be careful in jumping to conclusions about true culpability for alleged Medicare fraud. It's not infrequent that regulators bully firms into paying penalties to avoid legal costs or remain in good standing as government contractors. In some cases, the DeParle-connected firms did not admit to fraud or the cases are still unsettled.

But the bottom line, according of the AU Reporting Workshop, is still hard to jibe with the Obama administration's verbal war on the evils of lobbying: "In touting DeParle's accomplishments when he appointed her in March, Obama didn't mention the lucrative private-sector career she built since September 2000, when she left her government job running Medicare for the Clinton administration. Records show she earned more than $6.6 million since early 2001 . . . And the public wasn't told that much of that corporate career was built at companies that have frequently had to defend themselves against federal investigations. Critics see DeParle's re-emergence as a classic case of Washington 'revolving door' syndrome, despite Obama's suggestions that he would shut that door."

By the end of the Clinton administration, Medicare fraud was estimated by the U.S. General Accounting Office to costs taxpayers tens of billions of dollars a year. This happened on Ms. DeParle's watch. It makes one wonder how this czarina is going to root out waste when so much of it piled up the last time she was in charge.

-- Stephen Moore

Where Does the "WE" Come from in Health Care

I felt the need to share a post from the Black Conservatives Yahoo Groups Courtesy of NYCBlackAmerican

The collective 'we' are building up massive debt in trying to keep up with health care costs. Well, let me tell you a little something about this part of the 'we'.

• For 44 years, I contributed to my own health care insurance program. When I was dissatisfied with the program, I changed it at the once-a-year option I got to do so.
• I paid social security taxes.
• I paid for medicare, Parts A & B.
• I paid my co-pays which were not reimbursed by anybody and, in some cases, had to meet a deductible before I could even begin to claim benefits.

Now, where has all that money I and my employers paid into the Medicare system gone to? Here are some of the benefits distributed by Medicare Part B using my dime: physicians' services; home health care; services and supplies , including drugs and biologicals which cannot be self-administered, furnished incidental to physicians' services, diagnostic x-rays and other tests; surgical dressings, and splints, casts and other devices used for fractures and dislocations, etc., etc.

My private insurance, which I must keep, also provides me with all of these services. I am only eligible for Medicare Part A, hospital insurance. I hope my hospital takes it [many do not]. Why do I need Medicare? I don't and did not choose to have it.

So, when Obama speaks in terms of 'we', just who is he talking about? Not me. The federal government has squandered all the money it collected from me and my employer over 44 years, and now wants to make me a party to that mismanagement. I don't think so.

Focus on the BIGGER HealthCARE Picture

Insurance is only a small part of the problem. The bigger issue is ACCESS to care. Which is the real challenge of preventive and primary care. Lot's of people have coverage, and still cannot get care, because of lack of medical personnel, the attack on the nurse practitioner (including midwifery), and advanced or modern facilities. Even those who do not have coverage, still in an emergency get CARE, IF THEY CAN GET TO IT.

A few years ago, I suffered a miscarriage. I had EXCELLENT INSURANCE. however the town where I live although has many doctors and hospitals, only one facility has an OB/GYN unit and a handful of OB/GYNs and only one taking new patients, after a 5 week wait list. There are many places across America with this same phenomenon.

I like to say that Health care today, is lacking localized medicine, and like WALMART has killed the neighborhood retailer and grocer, BIG BOX hospitals with its Hospitalists have killed the neighbood clinic! A Hospitalist, is a hospital employed doctor, so instead of having his own practice, 0r is a partner in a practice of other doctors, this doctor just gets a salary from the Hospital. In this model, the hospital worries with the basic business operations of insurance, billing, staffing, etc. related to caring for the patient. It is not necessarily like a HMO, but could at times feel like one. This model is encouraged by the lack of tort reform. Without that, then the malpractice insurance makes it unsustainable for the local health care facilities to exist.

So can we please get back to the issue of CARE, and ask our elected officials how is providing insurance going to fix this umbrella problem!!!

My $ 0.02

Tanya Callaway Crews

A Health Care Bay of Pigs? - WSJ.com's Political Diary

Stuck on Health Care

President Obama is getting a clear message from his allies that he may have to scale back his health care goals in order to win passage from Congress. Even his own Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius told NBC's "Meet the Press:" "Our Democratic friends are having a hard time selling this to their own members, a very difficult time."

Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, one of Mr. Obama's earliest supporters in his 2008 campaign, has also weighed in with some advice not to demand too much from Congress, based on his own experience inheriting implementation of his state's "universal" health care plan -- which was passed in 2005. Mr. Patrick recently had to impose cuts in the program, which has seen large cost overruns.

"The untold story about the Massachusetts experiment has been that we finally recognized that there were more than just the usual two choices, which were to have a perfect solution or no solution at all," Gov. Patrick told ABC News at the National Governors Association meeting in Biloxi, Mississippi. "There is a cautionary tale for Washington because people are going to fret over a perfect solution and because there isn't one, we're going to get stuck -- or we are at risk of being stuck."

Concern about the floundering Obama health care plan is rooted in memories of HillaryCare, the Clinton administration's bold attempt to remake health care in 1993. First Lady Hillary Clinton was offered several compromise solutions that would have gotten her much, but not all, of what she wanted. She insisted on "all or nothing." The result was a plan that never made it to a Congressional vote and resulted in a political debacle for Democrats.

Mr. Obama is smart enough to scale back his ambitions to win passage of something from Congress and then declare "victory." From the comments of his allies, I detect the first effort on their part to prepare liberal diehards for the fact they may end up with less than a full loaf this year.
-- John Fund