https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8464-1806
-
Views
-
Cite
Cite
Lindsey Cormack, Heath Brown, A Decade of Congressional Efforts to Conduct and Communicate Oversight of Medicare and Medicaid, Public Policy & Aging Report, Volume 31, Issue 2, 2021, Pages 47–52, https://doi.org/10.1093/ppar/prab003
Close - Share Icon Share
Extract
When things get big, people start to ask questions. Fraud? Wasteful spending? Government abuse? In 2019, the New York Times published an article entitled “The Huge Waste in the U.S. Health System” (Frakt, 2019). While the major federal health programs in the United States—Medicare and Medicaid—provide vital health insurance for older and lower-income Americans, as each has grown since 1965, concerns have arisen over how efficiently the programs have been administered.
In the case of health care, prominent Republicans and Democrats have expressed concerns about health-care fraud, including Presidents Obama and Trump. We ask in this article if the two prominent federal health-care programs, Medicare and Medicaid, reflect the politicization of fraud or a rising bipartisan consensus. By focusing on how often members of Congress have spoken about Medicare and Medicaid with their constituents, we offer an empirical answer to this question. We do not investigate whether health-care fraud is a problem or not: rather, we focus on the extent to which politics has pervaded the Congressional debate and agenda about this dimension of Medicare and Medicaid. Relying upon a novel data set of the universe of Congressional newsletters over the last decade, as well as the universe of all legislation introduced, we find that claims and legislative proposals regarding fraud, waste, and abuse in the Medicare and Medicaid programs have changed over time and by party. On the whole, both Republicans and Democrats discuss the programs in official constituent communications and propose legislation, though Republicans have accounted for slightly greater numbers of communications and proposals.
