“A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money.”
DOGE demonstrated in the few weeks it was active the US government is wasting hundreds of billions of dollars. As a nation we are behaving like the spoiled child who spent his inheritance on expensive toys, alcohol and drugs, sexual depravity and then accumulated a mountain of debt. The day of reckoning finally arrives when lenders say no more, the assets are sold of for pennies on the dollar, friends and family disappear, and the penniless wastrel is ends up begging in the streets.
DOGE was a wakeup call for serious minded Americans, before it was essentially coopted and neutered by the bureaucracy. Despite hundreds of billions in waste identified by DOGE the scoundrels in Congress were only able to come up with $9 billion in savings to cut in the just passed rescission bill, demonstrating they are content to enjoy the orchestra on the Titanic while the ship goes down.
In some cases the patient pays for the service and then submits a claim to the insurance company for reimbursement. Each insurance company checks against its own records to make sure it is not a duplicate claim, but they can’t check against the records of the other insurance company, so double reimbursement is certainly possible. If the premiums for the insurance are paid by the insured this doesn’t work, because the insured would be paying twice the premium. But Medicaid is free, the insured pays nothing. You give some people something free, and they immediately demand more free stuff.