{"id":79,"date":"2026-06-17T16:14:27","date_gmt":"2026-06-17T16:14:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/rachelfortn.com\/blog\/?p=79"},"modified":"2026-06-17T16:14:27","modified_gmt":"2026-06-17T16:14:27","slug":"when-they-yell-about-medicare-fraud-count-the-money","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rachelfortn.com\/blog\/when-they-yell-about-medicare-fraud-count-the-money\/","title":{"rendered":"When they yell about &#8220;Medicare fraud,&#8221; count the money"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Wanna hear one of Republican&#8217;s biggest scams to fool their voters?<\/p>\n<p>The first time you heard &#8220;Medicare fraud,&#8221; somebody on a stage was probably mad about it. Fists going. Taxpayers getting robbed. Bad guys gaming the system.<\/p>\n<p>And sure &#8211; some of that is real. People do steal from Medicare. There are crooks who bill for wheelchairs nobody got and surgeries nobody had. The &#8220;free back brace&#8221; robocall that won&#8217;t leave your phone alone is an actual scam, and people go to prison for it.<\/p>\n<p>But here&#8217;s the thing about that word. It&#8217;s doing a lot of jobs at once, and most of them aren&#8217;t what you think.<\/p>\n<p>Start with the giant numbers.<\/p>\n<p>When a politician says Medicare loses fifty or sixty billion dollars a year to fraud, they&#8217;re almost never counting fraud.<\/p>\n<p>They&#8217;re counting something called &#8220;improper payments.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>A 2025 government analysis put those at 28.8 billion dollars in traditional Medicare and 23.7 billion in Medicare Advantage.<\/p>\n<p>Sounds damning. Except &#8220;improper&#8221; mostly means a paperwork problem &#8211; a missing signature, a wrong billing code, a payment that couldn&#8217;t be fully checked. CMS, the agency that runs Medicare, says it plainly: improper does not mean fraud.<\/p>\n<p>So when you hear &#8220;fraud&#8221; attached to that pile of money, somebody swapped the label.<\/p>\n<p>Now follow where the real money goes, because this is the part that doesn&#8217;t make the speeches.<\/p>\n<p>The biggest pot of wasted Medicare dollars isn&#8217;t street-level crooks. It&#8217;s the private insurance companies inside Medicare Advantage &#8211; the plans with the commercials, the gym memberships, the smiling actors.<\/p>\n<p>The way it works: the government pays those plans more for sicker patients. So the plans have a reason to make patients look as sick as possible on paper, whether they are or not. They code you up, they collect more.<\/p>\n<p>How much more? The people whose whole job is watching this &#8211; a federal panel called MedPAC &#8211; estimate the overpayments could hit 76 billion dollars in 2026, and 1.3 trillion over the next ten years.<\/p>\n<p>So, the &#8220;improper payment&#8221; panic is in the tens of billions. The Medicare Advantage overpayments are more than a trillion over a decade. One of these is the real money.<\/p>\n<p>Guess which one rarely gets the ranting.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ll be fair here, because the fix isn&#8217;t to pretend none of it matters. There&#8217;s a legitimate case for going after waste &#8211; every dollar that leaks out is a dollar not spent on somebody&#8217;s actual care, and the people running these programs should be hard-nosed about it.<\/p>\n<p>But they need to be hard-nosed about the trillion-dollar leak, too.<\/p>\n<p>Have you ever heard a Republican say out loud: the insurance companies are ripping off the government?<\/p>\n<p>Cause I haven&#8217;t.<\/p>\n<p>They scream about fraud in a way that leads you to believe that immigrants and poor people are committing fraud to get free healthcare.<\/p>\n<p>And one more sleight of hand to watch for.<\/p>\n<p>A lot of what gets called &#8220;Medicare fraud&#8221; on a stump isn&#8217;t Medicare at all.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s Medicaid, or it&#8217;s Obamacare &#8211; duplicate enrollees, coverage for immigrants, fake applications. House Republicans have pointed to 2.8 million duplicate Medicaid and ACA sign-ups and an estimated 27 billion dollars a year in improper Obamacare enrollments.<\/p>\n<p>Those are real arguments worth having. But you, the person hearing &#8220;Medicare,&#8221; picture your own benefits getting stolen. The actual target is the program that covers low-income kids and nursing-home grandparents. Different program, different people, same scary word.<\/p>\n<p>Why does the mix-up keep happening on purpose?<\/p>\n<p>Because &#8220;fraud, waste, and abuse&#8221; is the polite way to say &#8220;cut.&#8221; It&#8217;s the language you reach for when you want to trim who gets covered and not have it sound like that. The 2025 reconciliation law used exactly this framing &#8211; new work requirements and more frequent eligibility checks &#8211; to push people off the rolls.<\/p>\n<p>So next time the word comes flying at you, ask one question: are they going after the criminals, or going after the coverage?<\/p>\n<p>Those are not the same thing, and the people blurring them are counting on you not to notice.<\/p>\n<p>If you vote for me &#8211; I promise to drag the Medicare Advantage upcoding into the daylight instead of stepping around it. And a member can stop letting four words do the work of a cut nobody campaigned on.<\/p>\n<p>Out here in District 5 &#8211; across seventeen counties where a lot of folks are one bad diagnosis from real trouble &#8211; that&#8217;s the difference between a program that works and a talking point that doesn&#8217;t.<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<h3>Sources<\/h3>\n<ol>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.heritage.org\/health-care-reform\/commentary\/the-flawed-policies-driving-medicare-waste-and-how-fix-them\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Improper payment figures, traditional Medicare vs. Medicare Advantage (2025)<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/rollcall.com\/2026\/04\/02\/senate-democrats-call-on-cms-to-rein-in-medicare-advantage-abuses\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">MedPAC Medicare Advantage overpayment estimates<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/energycommerce.house.gov\/posts\/hhs-oig-found-hundreds-of-millions-in-medicaid-payments-for-deceased-individuals-in-a-2021-audit-republicans-are-continuing-to-crack-down-on-waste-fraud-and-abuse\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">House Energy &amp; Commerce Republicans, Medicaid\/ACA enrollment figures<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.cms.gov\/fraud\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">CMS, fraud vs. improper payment program integrity reporting<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Republicans rant about Medicare fraud. But the real money isn&#8217;t street-level crooks &#8211; it&#8217;s private Medicare Advantage plans overbilling taxpayers by more than a trillion over a decade. Here&#8217;s the trick, and who&#8217;s cashing in.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":78,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,5],"tags":[86,63,84,85,19,18,62,65,64,12],"class_list":["post-79","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-district-5","category-federal-policy","tag-healthcare","tag-medicaid","tag-medicare","tag-medicare-advantage","tag-memphis","tag-money-in-politics","tag-rural-healthcare","tag-rural-hospitals","tag-tenncare","tag-tn-5"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.8 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Medicare fraud: who is actually cashing in<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Republicans rant about Medicare fraud, but the real money is private Medicare Advantage plans overbilling taxpayers. 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