Medical Crime

Medical Crime
Name
Institutional Affiliation

Medical Crime
Every year, the states incur heavy costs due to fraud, abuse, and waste in Medicaid and diverting funds that could be useful in other legitimate health care services. Various practitioners raise the costs of Medicaid without necessarily adding value which leads to increased risks to patients exposed to unnecessary procedures (Thornton, Aly, Amrit, Brinkhuis, 2015). Government Accountability Office has reported a loss of large sums of money due to improper payments of non-covered services, and billed services but not provided. Medicaid fraud involves conscious misrepresentation of truth which leads to obtaining unauthorized benefits due to unnecessarily increased costs (Thornton et al. 2015). The Medicaid program has reported a significant increase in expenditures due to growth in the program. Despite the increased cases of Medicaid fraud, the program receives little media attention, and the regulator has been reluctant in prosecuting the perpetrators.
Just like street crimes, Medicaid regulators pay more attention to higher crimes such as a white collar. The healthcare regulators perceive that white collar crimes are more serious than Medicaid fraud which leads to less attention from the media and regulators. The healthcare personnel has so much pressure to succeed and fulfill the financial expectations of managers which leads to Medicaid fraud. As such, the regulator does not know how many frauds occur in a day since most of them remain unreported.

Additionally, the government may regard Medicaid fraud as any other shrewd business practice hence their dismissal. On the other hand, no one sees the results of Medicaid fraud despite many people being victims of the consequence. Healthcare regulators and the media concentrate on other medical crimes at the expense of Medicaid fraud. On the other hand, the government knows that the cases exist and therefore it has resulted in instilling various measures rather than prosecuting perpetrators.
References
Thornton, D., Aly, R., Amrit, C., Brinkhuis, M. (2015). Categorizing and Describing the Types of Fraud in Healthcare. International Journal of Medicine, 713-20. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.procs.2015.08.594.