CBS' 60 Minutes aired on Sunday an outstanding report on Medicare fraud, which they contend is a $60 billion a year problem. The Steve Kroft segment noted that Medicare fraud has overtaken drugs as South Florida's most lucrative criminal enterprise. The scam seems incredibly easy, perhaps because when the government gets robbed they don't care as much because it's not their money in the first place. Easy come, easy go. Phantom medical supply outfits obtain lists of older Americans, and then submit reimbursement forms to the gargantuan Health and Human Services bureaucracy for wheelchairs, prosthetic limbs, and hearing aids that they never supplied to the old folks on the lists they obtain. The government, obliged by law to cut a quick check to the medical interests, pays the money and then the phony medical supply outfits close up shop before the government figures out it has been had. It's a simple and effective racket.
The story has obvious and not-so obvious political implications. First, if the government currently gets ripped off to the tune of 100 Brinks robberies a day due to Medicare fraud, how mindbogglingly enormous would the fraud figure be if Barack Obama suceeds in empowering the federal government to offer Medicare for all, the so-called public option? Second, Attorney General Eric Holder pushing the issue of Medicare fraud couldn't have come at a more inopportune time for the Obama Administration.
Considered alongside Holder's impolitic "nation of cowards" speech on race, his strange talk of an assault weapons ban that his boss didn't want to touch with a ten-foot pole, and his witchhunt against CIA interrogators, Holder's decision to push the Medicare fraud issue makes one wonder what team he plays for. Is the former Clinton Administration official a fifth columnist for the sub rosa Hillary '12 presidential campaign? Probably not. After all, he supported Obama during the primaries. But his strange behavior as attorney general makes you think.
Even when Holder is doing good, as his war on Medicare fraud certainly is, the attorney general has a penchant for making the president look bad. He rarely is on the same page as Obama. He takes sides on issues that the president generally agrees with but, because of political considerations, can't put on the front burner. Gun control, taunting white people about racism, targeting CIA agents who go after terrorists, and highlighting Medicare fraud at the exact time Obama seeks to expand Medicare through a public option are all politically inexpedient for Barack Obama. Is it because Eric Holder knows this that he pushes these causes?
What's clever about Holder's game, if that is indeed what it is, is that should the president tire of him and fire him, Holder wins and again makes the president look bad in the process. By pushing issues near to the hearts of Obama's liberal base but offputting to nearly everyone else, Holder would get to play liberal martyr, the guy who tried to keep Obama honest, to the party's left wing. He would become, if he hasn't already, a hero to the MSNBC, Air Air America, Daily Kos crowd. His status as attorney general, which, although a cabinet position like any other, gives him an independence that his peers don't share. When, say, the Secretary of the Interior or Defense strays off the reservation, they get fired. When the attorney general does it, it displays his integrity and independence. In other words, Obama has put himself in a bad position by installing as his attorney general someone whose loyalty may be to the Clintons, or to himself, but not to the political future of Barack Obama. There's a reason John Kennedy made his brother attorney general.
Willie Sutton said he robbed banks because that is where the money is kept. His criminal forebears rob the government for the same reason. The only surefire way to decrease fraud in government is to give it less money, which flies in the face of everything the Obama Administration is trying to do with health care.
Nationalizing a rationined health care system? What could go wrong??!
