Without commenting on this specific situation, you're very naive to think government/regulatory policies are not exploited in systematic ways by rings/gangs. Have a look at cum-ex dividend fraud in Germany, GST refunds on gold in Australia, carousel/missing trader VAT fraud in the EU, ETS carbon credit fraud in the EU, etc. All multi to tens of billion dollar frauds that were systematically exploited by rings/gangs.
Yes, there’s always fraud but 40% of nearly a trillion dollars a year is an incredibly high number - like the entire Nigerian GDP! It’s simply not possible for that to be happening with a regularly audited public service which routinely finds and successfully prosecutes much smaller fraud operations. That kind of effort would involve hundreds or thousands of people and one of them would slip up.
This is a classic misdirection: fixing Medicare means dealing with the world-record inefficiency of the American healthcare system and paying a little more in taxes. They can’t say that because it’s unpopular with the rich donor class, and if they say services will be cut it’ll be very unpopular with their elderly base, so instead they point to something everyone hates and pretend that it’s big enough to solve the fundamental mismatch.
