Nancy L. Johnson: “That is right. There were a few other provisions that we were able to get into other bills a second time, and the…”

“That is right. There were a few other provisions that we were able to get into other bills a second time, and the President did sign, and one of those was an aggressive attack on Medicare fraud. Now I am the chairman of the Ways and Means subcommittee that does oversight, so we oversee all of the programs that are under the jurisdiction of the Committee on Ways and Means, but one of them is Medicare, and we had our high-risk program hearing; that is, the highest risk of fraud programs under our jurisdiction, and one of them was Medicare. Medicare is one of the programs in our Nation that has an extraordinarily high risk of fraud and a high volume of fraud. The inspector general said $20 billion of our expenditures in Medicare every year are fraudulent, paying for health care you did not get or did not need. So it is a very big problem, and I am proud to say that last year we did get passed a new antifraud program that will put regional people out in every regional office looking at nothing but Medicare fraud.”