How Fraudsters Are Bilking the Government Out of Billions of Dollars
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What exactly counts as government fraud and why does it matter?
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Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Oddlots podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal.
And I'm Tracy Alloway.
Tracy, what do you think about uh Doge?
Uh the coin or the the new Department of Government Efficiency?
The latter.
I uh here here's what I will say. Part of me hates that government efficiency is being politicized in this way because if you think that government services are a desirable thing to have, then you should definitely be against waste and inefficiency and fraud in that market, because at a minimum, if you're wasting money, you could be using that money to do even more. And then obviously if you think that government is just bad in general, then I imagine that you also think that the government wasting money is also bad in general. So there's
no there's no constituency. There probably shouldn't be an ideological constituency or political constituency for waste, right?
Yeah, exactly. Like I feel like we should all agree on this, but also I hate the way it's kind of unrolling. Let's let's put it that way.
I would say I broadly agree waste is bad, whether the existing makeup of this sort of quasi blue ribbon commission to get rid of waste, whatever that means, is actually gonna do it. Look, I'll be open minded, but uh I like the premise of Cracking down on waste. I will just say that. You know what the other thing is? So I first of all, part of the issue here is that waste is probably difficult to define. Fraud in some cases is probably difficult to define. There will probably pull be political fights over certain types of spending that it's like, you call this waste. I call this a good allocation of whatever. I imagine many of the political fights around this. will sort of revolve around some of these questions.
Yeah, there's a lot there, but I'm glad we generally agree that fraud is bad. Fraud
is bad, waste is bad. But I think you're absolutely right that the definitions are going to be crucial, right? And this is where I worry about the politicization because you can just come in and say, like, oh well, I don't like this, so I'm gonna call this a waste and and go on from there. But I think we should talk about it because you know, this has come up in a number of episodes, uh, specifically on the um PPP post-pandemic. And so it's clearly something that is on people's minds. Yeah.
Totally. Right now, we are recording this Thursday, November 14th. We are in a moment where resources in the economy are constrained, right? The unemployment rate is low. Inflation continues to be by some measures above the Fed's goal. It is not crazy from like a macro standpoint to think we need to make things more efficient and better to have a better use of our real resources right now. And one is a little bit more than a little bit of a This is
your other middle aged man thing who's decided to become like a real resource constraint guy, right?
Yeah, I'm like, oh we gotta we gotta crack down. You have to make tough decisions.
Here's a tough decision. If you're gonna talk to someone about government waste, would you talk to Elon or Vivek? There's two.
Well, Elon would get more downloads if we had him on the podcast. So I would talk to Elon. But we actually have a better guest. I I think we have the perfect guest. To talk about government waste, fraud, where we might be able to move the dial in a substantive way on this kind of stuff. We're going to be speaking with Jetson leader Luis. He is an assistant professor at the Questrum School of Business at Boston University.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What exactly counts as government fraud and why does it matter?
0:00–6:41
2
How do fraudsters exploit Medicare and Medicaid through ambulance services?
6:41–12:25
3
Why did the dialysis‑related ambulance scheme cost billions and how was it stopped?
12:25–17:34
4
What role did prior‑authorization rules play in slashing non‑emergency ambulance spending?
17:34–24:09
5
How can big data and statistical fingerprints expose hidden fraud patterns?
24:09–29:42
6
What is the False Claims Act whistleblower program and how does it incentivize fraud detection?
29:42–35:24
7
Which government reforms could most efficiently cut waste and fraud across programs?
35:24–40:36
8
Can we realistically move the needle on the estimated $100 billion annual healthcare fraud bill?
40:36–47:29
Speakers
8 identifiedMore from Odd Lots
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