Republicans in Congress have spent the past year sounding an alarm over waste, fraud and abuse in government health care programs with a midterm-focused message that cutting fraud will help lower consumers’ costs.
While many voters say that soaring health care costs are a top issue for the approaching elections, new polling shows they’re largely split along party lines on whether fraud is as important.
Republicans have spent a good portion of their limited legislative time on it, holding more than a dozen hearings or markups, including one this week. The issue rose to prominence during last year’s reconciliation process — GOP lawmakers pitched Medicaid spending cuts as eliminating waste of taxpayer dollars alongside a mission to tighten the government’s wallet in general.
“The big thing is the fraud,” Brett Guthrie, R-Ky., chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said in a brief interview earlier this month. “How do we give more tools to the executive branch to find more fraud, so we can actually go after people with fraud.” He said that the committee’s work on another issue, health care price transparency, dovetails with this effort by exposing practices that keep consumers in the dark.
