Mike Conaway: “while we are there, let me mention one other area of cost that waste, fraud, and abuse causes. Every single time we have…”

“while we are there, let me mention one other area of cost that waste, fraud, and abuse causes. Every single time we have an incident of waste or fraud, the regulatory agencies in charge put on layer upon layer of additional regulatory burdens to try to prevent it. I am not criticizing them for that, but that is just the way the system works. They try to figure out, how did this person cheat us, how can we put some additional regulations in place so that we do not let that happen again. Every time that happens, legitimate providers of services for Medicare, as an example, or health care have to continue to comply with this increasing burden of regulations that we have put in place. This costs them money. In a business, when you have to comply with a regulation of some sort, you either have to hire somebody to help you with that, a direct cost, or you have to allocate some resource within your organization who was previously working to help you make money and help you provide services to clients to comply with that. So either one of those costs those providers within the system money, and it is a direct result of cheaters in our system. Now, I am not advocating that we do not go find the cheaters; let us go find them and point them out.”