Report: IBM offered software that would save nearly $1 trillion on healthcare, but Obama admin turned them down

The obvious question — Why? — springs to mind.

“We could have improved the quality and reduced the cost of the healthcare system by $900 billion…I said we would do it for free to prove that it works. They turned us down, “IBM chairman and CEO  Samuel Palmisano said during a Sept. 14, 2010 taping of the Wall Street Journal’s Viewpoints program.

FOX News confirmed that a second meeting between Palmisano and Obama administration officials yielded the same result: “No thanks!” – even though the proffered “fix” would have eliminated 90 percent of the nation’s health care deficit – and cost taxpayers nothing it didn’t perform as guaranteed.

Yet Medicare/Medicaid fraud is still rampant. According to the Manhattan Institute’s Steven Malanga,”abuses of Medicaid (alone) eat up at least 10 percent of the program’s total cost nationwide — a waste of $30 billion a year. Unscrupulous doctors billing for over 24 hours per day of procedures, phony companies invoicing for phantom services, pharmacists filling prescriptions for dead patients, home health-care companies demanding payment for treating clients actually in the hospital — on and on the rip-offs go.”

Presumably the program would have weeded such obvious fraud out of the system. Can’t have that! So instead, we got a massive new law that threatens to bankrupt the country while also overloading our health care system.