John Stossel tears down the Medicare efficiency myth:

[L]ast month on "20/20" producer Miguel Sancho and I reported on Medicare’s $34 trillion in unfunded liabilities, on how Medicare is a prime example of government promising MUCH more -- that it is prepared to deliver. But the Obama administration has succeeded in promoting the fiction that Medicare is a shining example of government working well. Statists suggests that because Medicare only spends two or three percent of its budget on overhead, that means it's a smoothly running machine. Bevan cites recent columns by Jonathan Alter and Paul Krugman, and “West Wing” fans will remember Jimmy Smits’ Matt Santos making the same argument in the famous “live debate” episode.

Bevan argues persuasively that Medicare’s low overhead is the product of government accounting sleight-of-hand. But there’s a bigger point – the connection between “low” administrative costs and staggeringly HIGH levels of fraud and waste. As Michael Cannon at the Cato Institute and Regina Herzlinger at Harvard Business School have pointed out, much of the 10 to 20 percent of private insurance administrative costs goes to preventing fraud. Private insurers, you see, care about whether or not they lose money. Medicare, with its unlimited claim on the public purse, does not. It's only taxpayer money, after all.

The results are predictable, but breathtaking nonetheless: an estimated $68 billion (with a B) in outright Medicare fraud every year (About $3 billion in Miami-Dade county ALONE.) On top of that, according to well-respected Dartmouth researchers, roughly a third of Medicare's total $400 billion annual spending goes to procedures which were medically unnecessary.

Also, an audit of Social Security shows that millions in benefits are being paid out dead people. Gotta love government.