I’m shocked — shocked! A Trump administration official has admitted that the Medicare/Medicaid system is inherently vulnerable to fraud, but that is true of every single socialistic welfare-type program that the federal government or state governments have.
Our national U.S. debt is $38.6 trillion and climbing every second — literally. The U.S. birthrate continues to decline, as well. The harsh reality is that we cannot even afford our welfare programs right now, let alone adding millions more people to Medicare and other programs in the next few decades. Besides that, as noted by Dr. Mehmet Oz, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), massive government programs make it very easy for bad actors to exploit them.
Speaking to The Epoch Times, Oz explained how easy it is to commit fraud, “The opportunities to defraud Medicare and Medicaid are huge because the organization I run doles out about $1.75 trillion a year. It’s a lot of money. And the problem is that to defraud it, you basically can arm yourself by getting the beneficiary number of just one of those people over 65 or on Medicaid.”
Medicare is hardly the only government program vulnerable to fraud. My identity was stolen last year by someone who used it to take out federal student loans. The fraudster just put down my name, address, and social security number, invented obviously fake references, and typed my name as a signature, voila! I'm still trying to prove I'm not liable for the thousands of taxpayer dollars a year later. That's how easy the Biden administration made it to take out student loans at taxpayer expense.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Department of Justice have all taken action on the Somali Minnesota fraud scandal. SNAP is riddled with fraud. Dr. Oz said the healthcare fraud extends across multiple states. There is a fraud crisis impacting every major government program.
Related: Medicare Administrator Dr. Oz: Minnesota Fraud ‘Tip of the Iceberg’, Cuban Government Implicated
The Trump administration is working to reform programs, but the overwhelming majority of government employees now were government employees under Joe Biden — and in some cases, these people go back to the Obama years or further. In other words, reform will be lengthy and difficult. Not only that, but, as I said above, the programs are vulnerable inherently.
The Founding Fathers were completely opposed to our modern welfare system. They wanted welfare to be only for those who absolutely could not possibly take care of themselves — such as the severely disabled — or as a transitional reality preparing beneficiaries for taking responsibility once more. The Founders understood very clearly that if you once establish permanent welfare, and if it can even become a life-long income or generational reality, then America would go bankrupt — both financially and morally.
In fact, if we look back on history, that's exactly what happened to the ancient Roman Empire. Too many people were on a permanent government dole, and it became generational. Like modern Americans, many welfare recipients became lazy, entitled, and shiftless. It made the Roman Empire weak and financially insolvent.
Then again, that's not the only flaw in our modern welfare state. The reality is that the federal government is involved in many sectors, including education and healthcare, where it constitutionally should never have been involved. Our welfare system, like our federal bureaucracy, is overreaching, bloated, unwieldy, and very prone to fraud.
