WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama said Tuesday he’ll bring in high-tech “bounty hunters” to help root out health care fraud, grabbing a populist idea with bipartisan backing in his final push to overhaul the system.
The White House announcement came as Obama prepared to travel to Missouri today, taking his closing argument for the health reform bill to the nation’s heartland.
The overhaul approach now being pursued calls for the House to approve a Senate-passed bill from last year, despite House Democrats’ opposition to several of its provisions. Both chambers then would follow by approving a companion measure to make changes in that first bill.
Obama wants a House vote on health care by March 18, the day he leaves for a trip to Asia. House leaders have said they are unsure they can meet that date.
Obama’s anti-fraud announcement was aimed directly at the political middle.
Waste and fraud are pervasive problems for Medicare and Medicaid, the giant government health insurance programs for seniors and low-income people. Improper payments — in the wrong amounts, to the wrong person or for the wrong reason — totaled an estimated $54 billion in 2009. They range from simple errors such as duplicate billing to elaborate schemes operated by people peddling everything from wheelchairs to hospice care.
The bounty hunters in this case would be private auditors armed with sophisticated computer programs to scan Medicare and Medicaid billing data for patterns of bogus claims. The auditors would get to keep part of any funds they recover for the government.
The White House said a pilot program run by Medicare in California, New York and Texas recouped $900 million for taxpayers from 2005-2008.
The presidential memorandum Obama will sign today directs Cabinet secretaries and agency heads throughout the government to intensify their use of private auditors under current legal authority.
Americans still divided on reform, polls find
Americans seem to be divided almost equally on whether they would urge their congressmen to vote for the health care overhaul, according to the latest Gallup poll.
Another poll found that Americans want bipartisan cooperation on the issue — cooperation that’s nowhere in sight.
According to the Gallup poll released Tuesday, 45 percent of respondents said they favor the overhaul and 48 percent oppose it. The sampling error was plus or minus four percentage points, meaning that the results could be evenly split.
The high point in public support was 51 percent in October, Gallup found.
The latest findings are based on telephone interviews with a random sample of 1,014 adults, conducted March 4-7.
An Associated Press-GfK poll released Tuesday said that Americans don’t like the way the the health care debate is playing out in Washington.
More than four in five Americans say it’s important that any health care plan have support from both parties. And 68 percent say the president and congressional Democrats should keep trying to cut a deal with Republicans rather than pass a bill with no GOP support.
In the AP-GfK poll, 43 percent of those surveyed said Obama and Congress should keep working to pass health care this year, while 41 percent said they should start from scratch. On Capitol Hill, the Republicans favor that new-start approach; Democrats say that’s just a way to stall the effort to death.
The AP-GfK poll of 1,002 adults nationwide was conducted March 3-8, by GfK Roper Public Affairs &Media and had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 4.2 percentage points.
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