It's becoming clearer and clearer that the more federal dollars you have sitting around, the more people will devise ways to take them - whether they are supposed to or not.

Take Medicare, one of the biggest entitlement programs of the government, and super prone fraudsters.

Just two weeks ago, we interviewed Florida FBI Special Agent Brian Waterman who described just how easy it is to rip of Medicare; piece of cake.

All you need to do is set up a company, come up with a list of patients and recruit a doctor who wants to game the system.

Total fraud taken each year from Medicare comes in around $60 billion of taxpayer dollars.

The secrecy surrounding the program makes it harder to track the fraud, but the Wall Street Journal is shedding more light on Medicare.

The newspaper spent a year, and not an inconsiderable amount of money, getting access to a database of Medicare doctors - their names, their pay and their reimbursement rates.

This particular database contains facts about nearly 812,000 Medicare providers, and more than 1.5 million beneficiaries.

None of the health care providers are identified by name.

Still, reporters were able to identify abusers of the system - for example, a New York City-area family practitioner who pocketed $2 million in 2008 from Medicare ,  mostly by administering a wide array of sophisticated tests. Check this out:  sleep analyses, nerve conduction probes, and needle procedures  the very tests that typically signal outright fraud because they are so high priced.

The Journal found other similar cases of likely fraud, but doctors have sued to keep the data private.           

Likewise, there is a little-known panel of just 29 doctors called the relative value scale update panel that is pretty much responsible for setting doctors' fees in this country.

So how do they do it? They make recommendations to Medicare and Medicaid who pretty much take them.

Our point isn't to give doctors a hard time,  the vast majority are working hard and we get their reluctance to make their private details public, but alerting patients to fraudsters and opening up the process of  setting pay schedules would be a great service to taxpayers who are ultimately funding these services.

 

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