David Schweikert Calls for a Database to Prevent Medicare Fraud

Representative David Schweikert (R-AZ) addressed the full House Ways and Means Committee hearing on Medicare fraud, emphasizing the need to develop "a database" to prevent fraud in the first place.

Rep. Schweikert shared numerous reports exposing the fraud, including the ongoing California hospice scandal, from the past several years. Despite the fraud allegedly being known for this long, Rep. Schweikert "cannot get a single other member of Congress to sponsor the bill because it has the word 'Medicare' in it, and some of us vehemently disagree with each other."

He pointed out that identifying fraud through "data scientists identifying patterns" is "our greatest success." Thus, the Arizona congressman argued, telling the room, "You need actually to revolutionize the way we code."

"I beg of you," Schweikert implored. "How do I get my brothers and sisters, you in the industry, at the Medicaid level, the Medicare level, the things we see in the VA [Department of Veterans Affairs], the things we see up and down the healthcare stack, when we are being told, repeatedly, that there is trillions in fraud in a system that this year is going to spend a trillion dollars in seven years?"

Human intervention, he says, is too slow, because "every time we put the people in, it goes too slow, and the pay and chase model has to come to an end, because the Justice Department has how many criminal, not civil, criminal investigations going on for years, from the last administration and this administration, and we are never going to collect back a dime."

"It is time to develop a model, a database, that this money never, ever, ever, ever, goes out the door," Schweikert concluded, "so we can stop having hearings so we can tell each other how wonderful we are, about how we ae going to go after waste and fraud, and then we never enact the bills to do it."