Eye opening CNN report:

http://www.cnn.com/2013/07/29/health...one/index.html

If that link doesn't work, try this one from 2015: https://www.cnn.com/2015/11/12/us/re...ges/index.html

Able Family Support, in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles, billed Medi-Cal for seeing 179 patients on April 4th. An undercover CNN news team witnessed only 30 people enter from opening to closing that day.

The owner of it, Alexander Ferdman, was convicted of engaging in organized crime in Texas in 2000, yet somehow got a license to run this facility in 2003, despite convicted felons supposedly being barred from operating these clinics. Here is Mr. Ferdman:



It's lovely that California will deny you a driver's license if they see too many speeding tickets from another state, yet organized crime figures from just 3 years prior can come to CA and collect taxpayer money by running bogus rehab clinics.

Apparently public officials who tried to stop this rehab racket ran into bureaucratic nightmares, as well as apathetic co-workers who didn't give a shit about what was happening.

This, unfortunately, is the reality of publicly-funded health care in America.

Government oversight of Medicare and similar programs has been terrible, and blatant cases of fraud often go on for years before being caught -- and many get away with it. When I say blatant cases, I'm talking about ones like these, where some very simple legwork could root out obvious cases of fraud. In the '90s, a doctor overbilled Medicare for my tests my grandmother clearly never had, and in fact my mom had the smoking gun proof, as the test "results" were impossible to have matched my grandmother at the time. My mom tried to report it to the proper authorities, and she ran into roadblock after roadblock, and finally just gave up.

A lot of Americans have this fantasy where they get sick, they go to a doctor, they get treated, and the government foots the bill. They imagine it where the government does this more efficiently than our current system, as there would no longer be any middlemen for-profit insurance companies. As you can see by this example (and many others like it), the reality would be a tremendous amount of waste and fraud, and despite many pledges otherwise, the government usually responds with inaction.

This rehab fraud example is just one of many, many blatant abuses of Medicare/Medicaid and its associated state programs.