Gov’t Report: Tax Cheats Getting Paid By Medicaid

August 2, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Medicaid SC Gov’t Report: Tax Cheats Getting Paid By Medicaid

WASHINGTON (AP) — Thousands of Medicaid health care service providers still got paid by the government even though they owed hundreds of millions of dollars in federal taxes, congressional investigators say. A legal technicality is making it harder for the IRS to collect.

In a report being released Thursday, the Government Accountability Office says Medicaid payments to doctors, hospitals and other providers aren’t technically considered federal funds, since they’re funneled through state health care programs.

Because of that glitch, the IRS can’t just shut off the payment spigot to collect tax debts. Investigators only looked at three states, so the full extent of the losses is even greater.

One dentist who received more than $100,000 from Medicaid while owing back income taxes was spending money on fine dining, trips, spas, shopping and wine, the report said.

In another case, a medical transport company received more than $1 million from Medicaid while owing millions in unpaid payroll taxes for its employees. Not paying the payroll taxes is a violation of federal law.

Read More at OfficialWire. By Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar.

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Obama “Fixed” Medicare…With Rationing

June 24, 2011 By 4 Comments

John Goodman, FloydReports.com

While charges and counter-charges about Medicare are flying back and forth in Washington, hardly anyone seems to have noticed that Medicare’s financial problems have already been solved. They were solved by the health reform bill enacted last year, what some people call ObamaCare.

So why isn’t this front page news? Why aren’t people dancing in the street? Why isn’t the Obama administration boasting about this accomplishment far and wide? Probably because Medicare’s financial problems are slated to be solved by the unconscionable rationing of health care for the elderly and the disabled.

The most recent Medicare Trustees report conveys the same message as the last one: On the day that Barack Obama signed the health reform bill, Medicare’s long-term unfunded liability fell by $53 trillion. That sum is about three times the size of the entire U.S. economy. And, it gets better. Once the Baby Boomers work their way through the system, Medicare spending will grow no faster than the payroll taxes, premiums and general revenue transfers that pay for that spending.

So what does this mean for senior citizens who rely on Medicare?….

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ObamaCare Ruins Medicare Deliberately — But Why?

June 10, 2011 By 10 Comments

Dr. Milton Wolf, The Washington Times

“We don’t want to take away people’s health insurance,” Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius so graciously declared earlier this year. But then she quickly qualified that with these ominous words: “before they have some realistic other choices.”

Americans have overwhelmingly, consistently and wisely been opposed to a European-style, single-payer, government-run, socialized health care system. So how might the big- government types who are hell-bent on forcing their will upon us attempt to implement this oppressive system in America? Simple. By creating medical refugees desperate for any port in a storm. That storm is coming and, unlike global warming, it’s actually man-made.

America somehow managed to survive for 189 years without Medicare or Medicaid and, in fact, became the greatest nation in the history of humankind. Established in 1965 – a mere 46 years ago – too many politicians today lack the perspective to understand this health care altar at which they worship. Instead of reforming the system to align it with American values, they abuse it as an eternal source of giveaways to buy votes. As for the politicians of the 1960s, except for the mop tops and go-go boots, they were very much like the politicians of today: They made a lot of empty promises.

President Lyndon B. Johnson promised that Medicare would cost about $500 million a year – yes, million. He even said that if costs went higher, then he was going to look like the “worst kind of damn fool.” Just a year later, in 1966, the House Ways and Means Committee estimated thatMedicare would cost about $12 billion a year by 1990. The actual 1990 cost was $107 billion – off by an order of magnitude but close enough for government work. And that’s when costs really took off. By 2008, annual costs hit $599 billion and the program for the first time went into deficit-spending mode.

For all the Democrats’ dishonesty and reckless spending, Republicans weren’t exactly blameless either. In 2003, President George W. Bush and a Republican Congress doubled down and ushered in the largest expansion in Medicare history with their senior citizen prescription drug entitlement program. They claimed the price tag would be $400 billion for the first decade but quietly adjusted that estimate upward to $534 billion just one month after passage.

Parenthetically, just three years later, in 2006, the free market roared as a private company in Bentonville, Ark. – without a single dime of taxpayer money or the compulsion from know-it-all government bureaucrats – lowered prices of the top 331 prescription medications to just $4 per month (and later to $10 per three months), not just for seniors but for all Americans. And equally importantly, Wal-Mart did not send the bill to our children.

Today we know that LBJ and a lot of other politicians indeed are the worst kind of damn fools.

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Obama’s Dr. Death Tells Indiana to Fund Planned Parenthood

June 2, 2011 By 25 Comments

Steven Ertelt, LifeNews.com

The Obama administration today denied Indiana’s use of its new state law that would deny millions in taxpayer dollars to the Indiana affiliate of the nation’s largest abortion business.

Governor Mitch Daniels signed the law, which would cut off anywhere from $2 million to $3 million the Planned Parenthood abortion business receives in federal funds via the Indiana government through Medicaid.

Daniels said that “any organization affected by this provision can resume receiving taxpayer dollars immediately by ceasing or separating its operations that perform abortions.”

However, the Obama administration has told the state it can’t implement the new law, with Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Donald Berwick denying a request to deny funds saying the federal Medicaid law stipulates that states can’t exclude providers based on the services they provide.
National Journal. “We assume this decision is not unexpected.”

Berwick also said the law makes it so states can’t prohibit access to family planning, which is provided under federal law. His department released a memo advising states that they can’t exclude abortion providers from receiving taxpayer funds via Medicaid.

“Medicaid programs may not exclude qualified health care providers — whether an individual provider, a physician group, an outpatient clinic or a hospital — from providing services under the program because they separately provide abortion services,” Center for Medicaid Director Cindy Mann wrote in the memo.

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Obama May Challenge Indiana Law Defunding Planned Parenthood

May 24, 2011 By 2 Comments

Steven Ertelt, LifeNews.com

Not content that its friends at Planned Parenthood are losing out on taxpayer funds in Indiana, the Obama administration is considering challenging the law, which the state is already enforcing.

Governor Mitch Daniels signed the law, which would cut off anywhere from $2 million to $3 million the Planned Parenthood abortion business receives in federal funds via the Indiana government through Medicaid.

The law also contains several pro-life provisions that directly affect abortion, such as banning abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy based on fetal pain. The legislation also contains provisions to end all state-directed funding for businesses that do abortions, to protect pain-capable unborn children beginning at 20 weeks, to opt-out of abortion coverage in any state health exchanges required under the new federal health law, to require that women considering abortion be given full, factual information in writing, and to require doctors who do abortions, or their designees, to maintain local hospital admitting privileges in order to streamline access to emergency care for women injured by abortion.

Planned Parenthood challenged the constitutionality of the law and filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Indianapolis yesterday just hours after Daniels signed the legislation into law. It alleges the law would violate contracts already in place between it and the state and that it forces Planned Parenthood to choose between doing abortions and getting taxpayer funding.

However, Judge Tanya Walton Pratt declined to issue the injunction while she takes more time to analyze the legal issues involved in the lawsuit. That type of decision is usually an indicator that the judge will eventually issue a ruling against the party bringing the lawsuit.

Now, the New York Times reports the Obama administration may exercise its right to federal review of the law, because of the changes to Medicaid, and Obama official told the newspaper the administration will not approve the changes as adopted by Indiana. Although federal officials have 90 days to challenge the new law, the Obama administration may move sooner because of the current enforcement of it. The challenge may come in the form of partially or totally withholding federal Medicaid money from Indiana and threatening to do so often makes states comply. Of course, if the Obama administration follows through on the threat, it would hurt the poor Indiana residents the Medicaid program is designed to help.

The Times also indicates that the Obama administration is not a party to the lawsuit Planned Parenthood of Indiana filed against the law, but its move to challenge the law by threatening to revoke funding could make an impact on how the lower court handles the case, which it is expected to hear in two weeks.

Current federal law prohibits using the tax money to pay for almost any abortion, but the money can still go to groups like Planned Parenthood that do abortions and frees up funds they may otherwise spend on legitimate medical services to go to paying for or providing abortions. The Indiana law says any entity that does abortions is not eligible to receive the Medicaid funding.

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