The first thing I would do is put out a caution to us because what I see the Congress doing and what I saw this last year is us actually performing bad medicine. And that is that we get stuck in the idea of treating the symptom rather than treating the disease.
And whether you go to Harvard or whether you go to Thomson Reuters, here's -- there are some facts we know about health care in America. And the facts we know is one out of every three dollars that gets spent doesn't help anybody get well and doesn't prevent anybody from getting sick.
The second thing we know is, from the Congressional Research Service, that most of the mal-drivers (ph) today in health care come from government rules and regulations. The government now directs over 60 percent of the health care in this country. And if throwing money at it and creating new government programs could solve it, we wouldn't be sitting here today because we've done all that. It hadn't worked. So what I thought we ought to do is maybe talk about why does it cost so much, because the thing that keeps people from getting access to care in our country is cost.
......So when you break down the costs, what we know is 33 percent of the costs in health care shouldn't be there.
And how do we go about doing that? And what are the components of that cost? And when you look at, when it's studied, if you look at what Malcolm Sparrow from Harvard says, he says 20 percent of the cost of federal government health care is fraud. That's his number.
If you look at Thomson Reuters, when they look at all of this, they say at least 15 percent of government-run health care is fraud.
Well, when you look at the total amount of health care that's government run, you know, you're talking $150 billion a year.
So tomorrow, if we got together and fixed fraud, we could cut health care 7.5 percent tomorrow for people in this country.
So what we ought to do is do the Willie Sutton thing. We ought to go for where the money is.
What's the other area? What we do know -- and I'm guilty of this, Dr. Barrasso's guilty of it, Dr. Boustany is guilty of it -- is a large portion of the tests we order every day aren't for patients. They're for doctors. And the reason they're there is because we are risk averse to the tort system and extortion system that's out there today in health care.
And there are a lot of ways to fix that. But I just went through last night, if you add up what Thomson Reuters, which looked at all the studies that have been done and combined them in, they say between $625 billion and $850 billion a year of health care dollars are wasted.
So it seems to me if cost is the number one thing that's keeping people from getting care, then the efforts of us, as we go after cost, ought to be to go to those areas where the cost is wasted.
And there's a philosophical difference in how we do that. One wants more government-centered approach to that. I would personally prefer a more patient-centered, market-orient approach to that. But nevertheless, there's where we can come together, just on those two areas, where we could cut costs 15 percent tomorrow. And that's for everybody in the country.
What would -- what would happen to access in this country if tomorrow everybody's health care costs went down 15 percent? Access would markedly increase.
So what I would hope we would do is that we would go back and concentrate on the areas that have the biggest pot of gold for us. And the biggest pot of gold is, is we don't incentivize prevention. We don't pay rewards for great management of chronic disease. We have a system throughout the country where we're encouraging lawsuits that aren't productive for the country, and what they actually do is cause the cost of health care to go through the roof.
We also know there's some other real things that we ought to address. There are conflict of interests within the medical field. There's nothing wrong with addressing those and taking those off (ph).
We know that we do not -- we absolutely do not incentivize prevention. And I'm not talking about creating walking paths. I'm talking about paying people who actually do a good job to do prevention.
Talking about changing the school lunch programs where it meets the needs, nutritional needs of Americans. Changing the food stamp program where it incentivize people to eat the right things, not the wrong things. We actually create more diabetes through the food stamp program and the school lunch program than probably any other thing, because we're not feeding a -- offering and incentivizing a great response.
You know, when you compare the private sector fraud rates, it's 1 percent compared to Medicare and Medicaid. You know, there's estimates that there's $15 billion worth of fraud in Medicaid a year in New York City alone.
......So we haven't attacked that. We haven't gone where the money is. And my hope would be that we would look at where the money is. And if truly it's accurate -- and I don't know many people that will disagree that $1 in $3 doesn't help somebody get well and doesn't prevent it, then we ought to be going for that $1 in $3.
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