Conflict, war and medicine (catch all).

[Uboat509]

True, and though increased oversight is no magic bullet (I say that mostly because I do not believe in magic bullets) you (by which I mean “me”) have to wonder if the government isn’t somehow willfully part of the fraud if no reasonable effort in the area of oversight is being made.

It is never out of the realm of possibility but Ken White has a great quote that I cannot find now that says something to the effect of "Never attribute to malice what can be easily attributed to incompetence." Lack of oversight can be caused by a number of different things. It can be a regulator who is complicit with illegal activities at the local level. It can be a lazy and/or overworked regulator. It can be a regulator that lacks an effective regulatory mandate to actually be effective. It can also be an incompetent regulator. It can also be a lack of funding to have enough regulators to cover all the locations. It can also be a combination of several of these things together.

I would feel remiss if I did not mention that this sort of thing comes in an American flavor that most of us are unaware of.

There is absolutely no doubt that our bloated social programs have problems.

[ganulv]

It is never out of the realm of possibility but Ken White has a great quote that I cannot find now that says something to the effect of "Never attribute to malice what can be easily attributed to incompetence."

I don’t know about malicious, but when your job is to stem fraud and the best you (as an institution, and the higher-ups within it) can do is throw up your hands and say, “What else can we do?!?” I kind of think you yourself are acting fraudulently. But that’s a discussion for a dedicated Ethics thread.