Would Chopping the Variety of Medicare Staff Save Cash?

I’ve been following the assorted discussions of how you can reduce the dimensions of presidency.

Elon Musk, one of many cutters, desires to scale back the variety of staff within the federal authorities. This may usually make sense.

There’s one space, nonetheless, through which chopping the variety of staff would most likely improve authorities spending: Medicare.

Many individuals who favor Medicare inform us that one motive it’s so nice is that administrative prices are decrease than for the everyday personal medical health insurance firm. Administrative prices are decrease. However that doesn’t imply Medicare is extra environment friendly. It’s virtually actually much less environment friendly and the reason being fraud. With few directors, plenty of fraud goes unnoticed or unaddressed. If the variety of directors have been reduce even additional, fraud would virtually actually improve.

By one estimate, the quantity of fraud in Medicare and Medicaid is over $100 billion a 12 months.

I feel it’s credible that each extra 100 Medicare staff, if they really labored, would reduce fraud by $1 billion. So if the outlay per worker, all in, together with pensions, and so on., have been $200k per 12 months, an extra 100 staff would value $20 million. Let’s say I’m flawed and it takes 500 extra staff to chop fraud by $1 billion. Then that’s an expenditure of $100 million to save lots of $1 billion. After all, fraud is less complicated to catch on the present margin than at further-out margins. However I’d wager the federal government may spend below $1 billion on staff to chop fraud by $10 billion.