“Medicare for All” carries risk of fraud
On April 10 The Record published economics professor Gerald Friedman’s column, “Take it from an economist: Medicare for All is most sensible fix.” And on the front page of the same edition, the following article was published: “NJ doctor, 23 others charged and Medicare fraud case,” what federal officials say was a $1.2 billion scheme.
There are so many errors in Professor Friedman’s essay one doesn’t know where to begin. First, Article 1, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution does not mention healthcare one bit. In other words, the federal government has been engaging in unconstitutional activities by being involved in the people’s health care for decades.
Thus, expanding health care by providing “Medicare for All” would be an egregious expansion of federal government’s power.
Second, the irony is that the American people are “over insured.” Medical insurance – or for that matter any kind of insurance – is needed to cover catastrophic losses, not routine expenses such as a visit to a doctor or a minor automobile repair.
Third, to provide “universal coverage,” we need to reduce our reliance on health insurance for most if not all of our medical expenses and create thousands of nonprofit health centers to deliver medical care to poor and low-income individuals and families.
This is already being done at the Bergen Volunteer Medical Initiative in Hackensack, which is based upon the Volunteers in Medicine model created in the 1990s in Hilton Head, South Carolina.
Finally, Medicare for All would perpetuate more frauds as outlined in Wednesday’s paper. The lack of oversight in the current Medicare program should be a warning sign to proponents of taxpayer-financed universal coverage.
Murray Sabrin, Ph.D.
Fort Lee The writer is a professor of finance at Ramapo College and founder of the Sabrin Center for Free Enterprise.