I’ll be making several comments on Medicare fraud. The main narrow focus is fraud alone against Medicare and the American people, not the fraud that is Medicare or the criminality that Medicare employs in getting (stealing) its funds or the eventual downfall of Medicare. I’ll be mentioning a few subsidiary effects of Medicare too, but my focus is not those either.
In 2010, Medicare disbursed $524 billion. The number of people receiving funds in 2012 was 49.4 million. For comparison, take a very large business that has high revenues. The number one business is Exxon Mobil with $486 billion revenues, number two is Royal Dutch Shell with $470 billion and number three is Walmart with $447 billion.
Medicare is very large. Walmart is better for comparison of fraud because it’s a retail business with many customers and suppliers. Walmart has 100 million customers a week.
How large is fraud against Medicare? It runs about $60 billion a year. How large is fraud committed against the Walmart company? I do not know, but whatever it is, it is far, far smaller than $60 billion a year. A large fraud against Walmart reported recently was a $13 million credit card and gift card fraud. A recent large fraud case against Medicare was $430 million. Earlier this year, there was another large case of $452 million against Medicare.
I have access to a data base called Factiva that can search 8,000 publications. In the last year, a search on Walmart turns up only two (2) items, and they both report a $1 million loss due to counterfeit gift cards. The words “Medicare fraud” turn up 3,085 items.
For all dates covered by this source and that goes back to 1965 when Medicare began, 18,772 contain the words “Medicare fraud”, and eight (8) contain either the words walmart fraud or wal-mart fraud. That’s no misprint.
I think that we can safely say that Walmart’s fraud losses are infinitesimal compared to Medicare’s, or, alternatively, we can say that Medicare’s fraud losses are gargantuan.
