Mike,
You're correct in that I failed to incorporate the rest of my data in my analysis and I was assuming that the figures provided were on the low / conservative end. That was my error - not ashamed to admit it. The data that I failed to include was medicare and medicaid fraud (approximately $100 billion/year, along with fraud in the private sector insurance industry ($100-300 billion/yearly). I also should have stated U.S. citizen over 18 or even taxpayer.
Once you factor that information in, it's about $2,000/U.S. citizen over 18. So even if one were to say that the number of people defrauding services is over 3%, the impact on taxpayers is still far less than the criminal actions of corporate executives that led to the 2008 recession.
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Originally Posted by AustinMike
I'm not sure if they are ignorant, but they are either math challenged or don't proofread what they type or something is not explained in the analysis.
There are currently around 340 million people living in this country. Let's be conservative and use the 2010 census figure of less than 309 million. Let's say 308 million people. Let's be further conservative and assume that 10% of the population are not citizens. That leaves 277 million citizens. $3.5 billion divided by 277 million is less than $13 per citizen. How did they come up with $5,000 per citizen? Or am I missing something?
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