Medicare Fraud Crackdown Vowed

Vowing a renewed crackdown on the “unfair fraud tax” he said costs Medicare billions a year, President Clinton urged Congress on Saturday to pass legislation barring doctors from charging more for drugs than they pay themselves.

“Medicare is more than just a program. It reflects our values,” Clinton said in his weekly radio address. “It’s one way we honor parents and our grandparents and protect our families across the generations.”

Medicare fraud costs billions of dollars each year and undermines the nation’s ability to care for those most in need, he said.

“Taxpayers deserve to expect that every cent of hard-earned money is spent on quality medical care for deserving patients,” he said.

Clinton said that clamping down on drug overcharges would save $700 million over five years. He noted that a recent report by the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services found that what Medicare pays for drugs “bears little or no resemblance to actual wholesale prices that are available to physicians and suppliers that bill for these drugs.”

Clinton said the proposal, to be included in his budget for the 1999 fiscal year, will “ensure that doctors are reimbursed no more and no less than the price they themselves pay for the medicines they give Medicare patients.”

The drugs involved are those that physicians give patients directly. Drugs prescribed by doctors and dispensed by pharmacies are not covered by Medicare.

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The president said his proposal is just one in a series of actions he has taken to curb waste, fraud and abuse in the Medicare system.

He said that since taking office in 1993, more FBI agents and federal prosecutors have been assigned to Medicare fraud cases, resulting in a 240% increase in convictions and savings worth $20 billion in health care claims.

In the GOP’s counterpart to Clinton’s address, Sen. Charles Hagel of Nebraska charged that the recently negotiated treaty on global warming would devastate the U.S. economy.

Hagel argued that the treaty would give the United Nations control over the economic growth of the United States.

“This treaty will have a devastating effect on the American economy,” he said. “The Republican leadership in Congress will not allow the United Nations to dictate the loss of American jobs and higher energy prices for America’s families, farmers and businesses.”

The United States was one of 159 nations agreeing on a treaty aimed at curbing global warming. It agreed to reduce its emissions of carbon dioxide and other so-called greenhouse gases to 7% below 1990 levels by 2012.

At a fund-raising dinner later Saturday, Clinton likened Republican opponents to a swarm of Arkansas mosquitoes.

“You just swat ‘em and go on,” he said.

In a feisty speech at the dinner, which raised $250,000 for the Democratic National Committee, Clinton described GOP-led investigations of Democratic fund-raising during the 1996 presidential campaign as “part of the mosquito biting.”

Clinton called the investigations “a calculated, determined effort to use the hearing process to force everybody to hire a lawyer every second so we won’t have a penny to spend on the ’98 congressional campaigns.”