Jack Kingston: “You know, though, I hear this in our town meetings on Medicare with seniors all the time is that the fraud and abuse…”

“You know, though, I hear this in our town meetings on Medicare with seniors all the time is that the fraud and abuse, the sloppiness in billing is just unbelievable. My dad has diabetes, and he has macular degeneration, so he is legally blind. You know, diabetics have to check their blood sugar level all the time, and so in the condominium complex that he lives in Athens, GA the seniors all kind of help each other out. So one of his things is he gives advice to lots of his neighbors, and he says over and over again somebody goes to the doctor, the hospital, on Medicare for a head cold, they are billed for x-rays or whatever, it is just. And you do not know. There is another story of a woman just outside of Brunswick, GA, who instead of going to have stitches removed in Brunswick, the ambulance drove her to Jacksonville because it is legal under Medicare, and the Jacksonville trip allowed the ambulance company to charge $1,200 whereas, had they just gone to Brunswick, it would have only been $200 or $300. So legally they can be very, very aggressive on their delivery service just to get the higher amount. You never see that in the private sector. That was one of the reasons that health care inflation skyrocketed in the 1980's, but in the private sector, companies started getting aggressive about it and they brought that down.”