{"id":935,"date":"2010-04-15T11:17:51","date_gmt":"2010-04-15T17:17:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stardel.com\/eg\/?p=935"},"modified":"2010-04-15T11:17:51","modified_gmt":"2010-04-15T17:17:51","slug":"what-a-waste","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stardel.com\/eg\/2010\/04\/what-a-waste\/","title":{"rendered":"What a Waste"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>Each year, the federal government wastes billions of American taxpayers\u2019 dollars on improper payments to individuals, organizations, and contractors.\u00a0 These are payments made in the wrong amounts, to the wrong person, or for the wrong reason.\u00a0 In 2009, improper payments totaled $98 billion, with $54 billion stemming from Medicare and Medicaid.\u00a0 We cannot afford nor should we tolerate this waste of taxpayer dollars and in our health care system.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.whitehouse.gov\/the-press-office\/president-obama-announces-new-effort-crack-down-waste-and-fraud\">From the White House<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Let&#8217;s see, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.gpoaccess.gov\/usbudget\/index.html\">$3,830 Billion budget<\/a> &#8211;\u00a0 $98 Billion waste. That&#8217;s about\u00a0 2.6% percent waste. Not the best of numbers, but certainly not worth going into <a href=\"http:\/\/www.gao.gov\/fraudnet\/fraudnet.htm\">a paralytic fury <\/a>about.\u00a0 I suppose it is easier for some people to grasp a much smaller number than the almost $4 trillion dollar federal budget. Why not allocate another $1 Billion to Inspector General offices to reduce the waste. If they can reduce the waste by 2% or more they more than pay for them selves.<\/p>\n<p>The 2011 Medicare\/Medicaid budget seems to be about $755 Billion. with $54 Billion in waste that is over 7% fraud. HHS is planning to increase their Fraud unit budget $250 million in 2011 to $561 million. Maybe that will reduce the waste a bit.<\/p>\n<p>That leaves $44 Billion in waste for the remaining $3075 Billion\u00a0 budget, or 1.4% waste.<\/p>\n<p>I was going through the federal budget looking to see who had Inspectors General in their budget items. I was surprised to see that not all departments have an Inspector General. Especially surprised the Department of the Interior doesn&#8217;t have one large enough to have its own budget line item. Somewhere in the text write up the Inspector General is mentioned. I guess that explains why <a href=\"http:\/\/www.albionmonitor.com\/free\/biatrustfund.html\">billions of dollars from the Indian Trust funds have gone missing<\/a>. But Interior not only has the BIA but they also oversee our royalty payments from the industries extracting minerals from public lands.<\/p>\n<p>At least<a href=\"http:\/\/www.gao.gov\/fraudnet\/fraudnet.htm\"> GAO gives the citizens a chance to report t<\/a>he fraud they see.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Each year, the federal government wastes billions of American taxpayers\u2019 dollars on improper payments to individuals, organizations, and contractors.\u00a0 These are payments made in the wrong amounts, to the wrong person, or for the wrong reason.\u00a0 In 2009, improper payments totaled $98 billion, with $54 billion stemming from Medicare and Medicaid.\u00a0 We cannot afford nor &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/stardel.com\/eg\/2010\/04\/what-a-waste\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">What a Waste<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-935","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-politics"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4NpF-f5","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stardel.com\/eg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/935","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stardel.com\/eg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stardel.com\/eg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stardel.com\/eg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stardel.com\/eg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=935"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/stardel.com\/eg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/935\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":937,"href":"https:\/\/stardel.com\/eg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/935\/revisions\/937"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stardel.com\/eg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=935"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stardel.com\/eg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=935"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stardel.com\/eg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=935"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}