Predicted what, you ask? Oh, that private companies contracting with the federal government to provide services and oversight for the Medicare Drug Benefit Program might defraud the government out of millions of dollars, that’s all:

WASHINGTON (AP) — Government auditors said they found nearly $90 million in potentially questionable payments from the Medicare program to contractors helping enact the prescription drug benefit for the elderly and disabled. […]

The contractors helped with marketing and with oversight of the 1-800-Medicare help line. They also provided technical expertise. The questionable payments represent about $1 out every $7 spent.

Auditors said they found payments that did not comply with the terms of contracts. For example, the agency paid more than the contract’s ceiling amount and for travel costs that exceeded allowable limits. In other cases, it could not obtain adequate documentation to support costs billed, such as invoices or time sheets. In one case, the agency was billed twice for $95,000 worth of equipment.

The auditors said that Medicare’s contracting has more than doubled over the past decade. Yet, the number of full-time employees providing contract oversight went up 11 percent during that time.

Now this is not fraud by the pharmaceutical companies. This is merely fraud by the outsourced private companies who were supposed to market the new Medicare drug benefits to Medicare recipients, as well as provide “oversight” for the program. Still, $1 out of every $7 paid by the government to these contractors was deemed “questionable” at best. Makes one wonder how bad the fraud and waste might be from the insurance and pharmaceutical companies who are reaping billions of dollars of profits from the drug benefit plan, the same plan conceived and pushed through a bamboozled and compliant Congress by the Bush administration that screwed over so many Medicare patients when it was implemented.

Just part and parcel of a by now familiar, and discredited, Republican and conservative agenda to “privatize” as many government services as possible. The assumption held by many conservatives was that private companies would be less wasteful of our tax dollars and more efficient than “Big Guvmint” bureaucracies. Indeed, this is the same assumption that also lies at the heart of the outsourcing of military and other services in Iraq and Afghanistan to Halliburton, KBR, Blackwater, etc. Supposedly those private contractors would save us billions of dollars that would otherwise be wasted by the Feds and/or the US Military. Sadly, but not unexpectedly, the reverse has been the case. For example, helped in large part by the billions of wasteful dollars paid to private government contractors, we now know that President Bush’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in six short years have already outstripped the entire amount the US government spent on the Vietnam war, making it the second costliest US conflict in history:

According to a study by the Washington-based Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, Congress has now approved nearly $700 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“Using inflation-adjusted dollars, the total cost of those wars has now surpassed the total cost of the Vietnam war (which ran to $670 billion),” the group’s Travis Sharp told OneWorld. “It’s also more than seven times larger than the Persian Gulf War ($94 billion) and more than twice the cost of the Korean war ($295 billion).”

As a result of Wednesday’s vote, Sharp said, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will become the second costliest conflict in American history, trailing only World War II.

In WWII, America fought on three continents and two oceans against the combined might of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, adversaries with millions of soldiers and sailors serving in their armed forces who employed some of the most technologically advanced weapons (for their time) against our troops. In Iraq and Afghanistan? Not so much. Indeed, one could say never in history has so much been spent to achieve so little in war. But give Bush enough time (and an unlimited credit account from Congress) and I’m sure he can beat the fiscal record set by the Greatest Generation. And the private companies who are benefiting from all of this public largesse will continue to reap their undeserved rewards even as our nation goes further and further into debt.