Waste makes.....well Waste

I was reading the news; you know trying to keep up with everything when I came upon this article about Government waste. According to The Heritage Foundation, that if the government truly cut down on its waste, it could save over a $100 billion annually; and that is money desperately needed elsewhere. The article goes into detail of extreme waste like the fact in 2003 that there was $24.5 billion dollars spent, but strangely enough, no one knows where it went to. Don’t start freaking out yet it gets better, an audit revealed that between 1997 and 2003, the Defense Department purchased and then left unused approximately 270,000 commercial airline tickets at a total cost of $100 million. Did you catch that? “Left Unused!!!” Okay it’s one thing to buy a bunch of airplane tickets but to not even use them is just idiotic. Even though all these things are bad, there is one that puts them all to shame. According to the article the biggest waste is the way Medicare works. Medicare pays as much as eight times what other federal agencies pay for the same drugs and medical supplies. The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) recently com­pared the prices paid by Medicare and the Depart­ment of Veterans Affairs (VA) health care program for 16 types of medical equipment and supplies, which account for one-quarter of Medicare’s equip­ment and supplies purchases. The evidence showed that Medicare paid an average of more than double what the VA paid for the same items. The largest difference was for saline solution, with Medicare paying $8.26 per liter compared to the $1.02 paid by the VA. I’m not the greatest math student but by the numbers, somebody’s getting screwed over. After reading this article and seeing this waste, I wonder why hasn’t anything been done?