National Sea Grant College Program Amendments Act of 2015
Floor Speech
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Mr. COATS. Mr. President, I return to the floor now for the 47th week for the 47th edition of the ``Waste of the Week.'' I highlight documented examples of waste, fraud, and abuse of hard-earned taxpayers' dollars that come to the Federal Government and that the public has every right to expect us to spend wisely, effectively, and efficiently.
Nonpartisan agencies like the Government Accountability Office and inspectors general are the watchdogs that examine how various agencies spend money and then report areas where they think expenditure doesn't live up to the promises that have been made, in terms of what it would accomplish, or question whether it ever should have been provided in the first place.
Some of the examples I have provided over these 47 weeks have been labeled simply as ridiculous. I raised those because it grabs the attention of the American public, saying: How in the world could the Federal Government allow something like that to happen with my tax dollars? I get up every Monday morning and go to work and I work hard for those dollars and I have a mortgage to pay and I have bills to pay. I have gasoline I have to put in my car to get to work and back. Then I hear something on the floor of the U.S. Senate, from the Senator from Indiana, that is a documented expenditure that falls clearly within the category of simply a ridiculous decision--waste, fraud, or abuse.
So whether it has been Federal grants to perform massages on rabbits--yes, massages on rabbits--to see whether a massage makes them feel better after a strenuous workout, I think any one of us could basically say you don't need to spend several hundred thousand dollars to prove that is something that works, or whether it is solar-fried burgers--I think 7,000 or so--that fly over a mirrored number of acres in a desert in California that are reflecting sunlight to a boiler, which has not proved to be cost-effective, and in the meantime it creates so much heat it has caused the cables that are necessary to produce the heat to be fried and also birds that fly over this solar field. I am surprised the environmentalists are not on top of that. Then there are the gambling monkeys, to see whether the monkeys were willing to take a greater risk and continue gambling if they had a reward for it--like, in their case, for food. I could have proven that with my dog that will eat anything I put in front of him, no matter how much I put down there.
We are talking about several hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars. Those are ludicrous. They are designed to catch people's attention so they will pay more attention to some of the examples of egregious wastes of money, designed for, perhaps, a good motive or the right purpose, but exposed, it is something that falls within that category of waste.
In one of my very first ``Waste of the Week'' speeches, I talked about the issue of double dipping in Social Security disability funds and unemployment insurance. To receive clearance to receive Social Security and disability payments, you have to prove you can't work; you are disabled, you can't work. But to receive unemployment insurance, you have to be working and then be told you can no longer keep your job, and in that interim period of time until you get a new job, we are going to pay you insurance benefits. What the General Accounting Office found out was that people were getting checks for doing both. Look, you can do one or the other but not both. That was no small change. That was $6 billion. I think it is $5.7 billion of documented waste every year.
Well, here we are at No. 47, and I would like to highlight yet another serious and very concerning example of waste: improper payments of taxpayer money through Medicare. All of us agree Medicare is an important program for millions of Americans, and we need to do what we can to preserve these important health care benefits for those who depend on them and need them, but an essential part of preserving these benefits is protecting Medicare from waste, fraud, and abuse. Throughout its history, we have read, and it has been determined by inspectors general and by the Government Accountability Office, Medicare has been plagued by improper payments which are payments that are not justified can occur because of fraud or bureaucratic mismanagement. These improper payments not only threaten the solvency of Medicare, they leave millions of seniors vulnerable because when these improper payments are the result of fraud and abuse, they can jeopardize the health and well-being of Medicare beneficiaries for this reason: The reason is, Medicare is going broke. It is careening toward insolvency.
The Medicare trustees have said we are only 12 short years away from insolvency under Medicare Part A. When you determine waste, fraud, and abuse, on a year-after-year-after-year basis in the billions and tens of billions of dollars, these are dollars not available to keep that program solvent. That is going to have a devastating effect on the ability for us to provide the Medicare services people of a certain age need.
How many taxpayers' dollars am I talking about today? Well, in fiscal year 2015 alone, just in that year, the last year where the audits have been done, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, or CMS, which administers Medicare, improperly paid out $59 billion for health services--in one single year, $59 billion of improper payments, representing nearly 10 percent of the total amount Medicare spent that year.
As I said, just last month the Medicare trustees said Medicare Part A would be insolvent by 2028. Think about how much that 1 year of $59 billion can do to help keep the program solvent. All of this is why it is all the more necessary for Congress, the administration, and the health care agencies to work in unison to solve this crisis of Medicare solvency.
There is a group known as the Medicare Fraud Strike Force, and I commend whoever put that idea in play. It needs to be advanced significantly, but the idea with the strike force was it could root out the bad actors and bring them to justice. As an example, recently the strike force uncovered a ring of over 300 people--from physicians and pharmacists to nurses and government officials--who have allegedly conspired to defraud Medicare out of $900 million.
How did they do it? Well, some of the examples in this fraud ring include the billing of Medicare for procedures the providers claim took place after the patient passed away. They were submitting Medicare claims for dead patients and receiving significant payments. Other providers billed Medicare for home health care, which is reserved for bedridden seniors, for services that were not even provided to the patients in need. It was fraud, in terms of people submitting many bills to CMS and receiving payments when the services were not provided.
In Detroit, a so-called medical clinic billed Medicare for tens of millions of dollars, when in fact the clinic was determined to be a front for a narcotics diversion scheme. The clinic operators and recruiters targeted poor drug addicts who needed help and offered those addicts narcotics so clinics could then bill for Medicare services that were not provided. This was tens of millions of dollars. These are just examples of what the IGs found in terms of looking at Medicare payments. That is why I continue to come down every week to urge my colleagues in the Senate, in the House of Representatives, and the administration to take the necessary steps to tighten the screws on bad actors in Medicare, in agencies across the realm of this government, not only because they are gambling with the health of some of America's most vulnerable patients but also because we have such precious little time to work to save this program from insolvency.
Our goal should be--in fact, it must be--to protect seniors, to promote good government practices, and achieve real savings by addressing these issues now.
With that, I am adding another major amount of waste, fraud, and abuse for an ever-growing total. This week it is $59 billion for Medicare improper payments, bringing the total all the way to $234-plus billion in waste, fraud, and abuse of hard-earned taxpayer dollars.
We wonder why the public has lost confidence and faith in their elected representatives and their institutions of government, when we see this kind of bureaucratic mess, when we see this kind of waste of hard-earned tax dollars, the fraud that is involved that is not detected and the abuse and terrible decision making by people who, respectfully, work for government agencies but don't exercise the kind of judgment the American taxpayer expects from them in terms of dealing with the money they send to Washington.
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