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Medicaid Overpayments

What is the overpayment rate of the Medicaid program?

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Medicaid is the federal government’s primary healthcare program for low-income people. According to federal estimates, Medicaid averaged $42 billion in overpayments per year from 2015 to 2024, which was 10% of the program’s outlays. Per the U.S. Government Accountability Office, “Once fraudulent or improper payments are made, the government is likely to only recover pennies on the dollar.” Since Medicaid was founded in 1965, the portion of the U.S. population receiving Medicaid benefits for the entire year has increased from 2% in 1966 to 26% in 2024.

DocumentationMedicaid Fraud Medicaid History

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Politics of Division

In his victory speech, U.S. Senator-elect James Talarico (D–TX) denounced the “politics of division,” claimed that the “real fight” isn’t “left versus right” but “top versus bottom,” and asserted that “we must unrig this economic system that only benefits the top 1%.”

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IN FACT, Talarico is using leftist class warfare rhetoric that has famously divided and impoverished people, while the U.S. economic system has created more material prosperity for the masses than any other country. Here are the specifics:

Karl Marx, the author of the Communist Manifesto, wrote that the “history of all” human societies is “class struggle” and that the “accumulation of wealth” by “capitalists” causes an “accumulation of misery” and “poverty” for the “working class.”
Likewise, the Communist Party Platform of the Soviet Union invoked “class” more than 80 times and called “capitalism” the “last exploiter system in human history.”
Beyond Talarico’s words above, he stated in 2020 that we need to “begin the process of dismantling” “oppressive systems” like “capitalism.”
In reality, the masses of people in capitalist nations have consistently had dramatically higher standards of living than in socialist nations.
In the 1980’s — while the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was asserting that their “progressive-minded people” cared for the “interests of the working class” by creating a “socialist way of life” — the living standard of the “Soviet people was roughly one third that of the United States.”
Per a 1999 paper in the Oxford Review of Economic Policy, “Despite the clear association of modern capitalism with the richest countries in the world, most of the poorer countries rejected capitalist models until they had tried a number of alternatives. Many of those detours — especially socialism and national socialism — imposed horrific costs on these societies and on others that got in their way.”
As explained by Harvard economics professor Jeffrey D. Sachs, “Marx fundamentally misunderstood that economic value is created not only by labour, but also by entrepreneurship, saving, and technological progress. Marx’s most deadly legacy, indeed, was the interpretation that gaps in income between rich and poor are caused by exploitation rather than differences in productivity.”
Further echoing Marx, Talarico has accused billionaires of “destroying America,” alleged that they are the “reason poverty exists,” accused them of “hoarding,” and described their wealth as a “spiritual sickness.”
In reality, billionaires are often generous philanthropists and place their wealth into investments that increase productivity, which is the primary driver of living standards and one of the main reasons why middle- and low-income Americans are richer than their counterparts in every other nation of the world.
Furthermore, billionaires pay roughly one-third of their income in federal taxes every year, and the combined net worth of all 989 billionaires in the U.S. ($8.4 trillion) is only enough to fund the federal government for 1 year or pay 21% of the national debt.

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