Posted by Bill Sandweg on 01 August 2016.

The medical profession loves the idea of “tort reform.”  They love it here in Phoenix, Arizona and across the country.  By “tort reform,” the medical profession means that citizens should be deprived of their right to be compensated when someone negligently injures them, so long as the person doing the injuring is a physician, nurse or other health care provider.  The reason this is so important, the medical profession insists, is that the cost of making it up to the people injured by medical malpractice is too high and drives up health care costs for everyone.  The medical profession is just looking out for us citizens and making sure that our health dollars are spent wisely.  That medical malpractice claims are driving up health care costs is simply not a true statement and has been disproved on many occasions by a review of the data.  What is true, however, is that fraud by members of the same medical profession that wants to take away your rights is a huge driver of health care costs.

Recently, the Medicare Strike Force of the federal government charged a ring of medical profession fraudsters in South Florida with defrauding the Medicare system of over a billion dollars.  That is billion with a “B”.  The scheme mostly involved admitting ineligible patients to nursing homes owned by the conspirators, performing unnecessary procedures and billing Medicare for all of it.  The total payment for all medical malpractice cases in 2013 was only a little over $3.5 billion.  These members of the medical profession stole an amount equal to almost 1/3 of the total of all the medical malpractice claim payments made in one recent year, and that was only in South Florida.

The Medicare Strike Force has only been in existence since 2007.  During its relatively short life, it has charged almost 3,000 members of the medical profession with stealing over $10 billion from the taxpayers through Medicare fraud.  And that is only Medicare.  These figures do not include the amounts members of the medical profession steal from the states or from private insurers.  On top of that, these figures represent only the fraudsters who have gotten caught.  No one is naive enough to think that we have identified all of the members of the medical profession who steal from us.

Before the medical profession asks you to give up your rights in the name of saving health care dollars, demand that it stop or at least reduce fraud by its own members that cost us far more each year than all the medical malpractice claim payments put together.  Medical profession, heal thyself before asking us to give up our rights.