SILOAM SPRINGS — For those of you who want the federal government to take over the U.S. health care system, I want you to consider what has happened to the highly trumpeted government program designed to help the housing industry. As you read on, think about it.

In good faith, our wise government officials decided it would be a good thing to set aside $13.6 billion earlier this year for tax credits to help first-time homebuyers. On the surface, this sounded like a worthwhile program. Keep in mind the people who set up this program are the same ones we elected to represent all of us, so don’t get bogged down in minor details like the federal government designating a certain group to be winners in the tax lottery game, i.e. first-time homebuyers.

Put aside any such prejudices and let’s look at the success of the program to date, and how its beenmanaged or mismanaged. And keep in mind, this project at $13.6 billion is only an infinitesimal fraction of what the trillion-dollar ObamaCare government run health care system will be.

The 6.2 percent factor

According to Bloomberg News, more than 1.2 million borrowers have claimed nearly $8.5 billion. So far, so good, because this program was created to help bring us out of the worst housing crisis in the last 50 years. So, if 1.2 million new home buyers benefited that’s good. Right? It sounds OK until we look a little more closely at some of the statistics.

About 6.2 percent of those who were helped might not have met the qualifications for a “first-time homebuyer.” While 6.2 percent doesn’t sound too bad, let’s see how many people 6.2 percent really is. The number equates to 73,799 wrongfully enriched buyers. That’s a lot of fakery. The amount of money claimed by those who were not entitled to the entitlement was nearly $504 million. That’s a lot of moola.

Auditors also found that over 19,000 tax filers claimed more than $139 million on homes they had not purchased, and more than 3,200 supposed homebuyers filed tax forms with individual tax ID numbers, not Social Security numbers.

You don’t suppose that some of those 3.200 were not in this county legally do you? To make matters worse, if there is such a thing, 582 people were ineligible because they were under 18 years old, and onesupposed buyer was only four years old.

While this has absolutely nothing to do with the government takeover of our health care system, I am citing these statistics to show how slipshod a well meaning program can become when the bureaucracy is in charge. This brand new first-time homebuyer program is rife with fraud after only a few months, and it’s relatively simple to manage, unlike health care with all its tentacles.

More government faux pas

Here are a few more startling facts, at least they were to me. The Government Accountability Office estimated that in 2008 the federal government made $72 billion of improper payments involving 78 programs and 22 agencies. The most costly of the erroneous payments were: Medicaid $18.6 billion;Earned Income Tax Credits $12.1 billion; Medicare Regular $10.4 billion; Medicare Advantage $6.8 billion. There are numerous others but all were less than $5 billion which could be considered “chump change.” Of course we, the taxpayers are the “chumps.” Something I found interesting about these numbers is that President Obama has said he would save $500 billion over 10 years by cleaning up Medicare.

He must know something the GAO doesn’t. If you add up the Medicare numbers along with Advantage, that sum is $17.2 billion. A shocking number, but $17.2 billion times 10 years equals $172 billion, which is $318 billion short of Obama’s prediction.

While Hurricane Katrina is old news,Obama was pressed by a New Orleans resident on his recent trip there. He wanted to know why rebuilding efforts were so slow.

Well, I don’t know all of the answers, but I do know that some of the money went to people who took Caribbean cruises and bought illegal drugs and booze. One person even was reimbursed for a sex change operation. I don’t know if this was erroneously charged to recovery or to stimulus.

I could go on and on, but suffice it to say that we do not need another government run program. Health care amounts to more than 16 percent of our economy.

The fraud and waste cited in this column would be just the tip of the iceberg compared to the massive milking of dollars that will occur under the usual and inept federal government management.

I opine, you decide.

- Willie Williams is a Siloam Springs resident. He can be reached at bryjwil@yahoo.com.

Opinion, Pages 4 on 10/28/2009

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