That is bad, but the $2.7 trillion in medicare and medicaid payments going to Europe, many going to banks, is even worse.
They are related. The issues in Medicare and Medicaid, and myriad other programs, are rooted in the Social Security system. If you fix the boondoggles in Social Security a lot of downstream issues are going to be affected as well.
SSA has rationalized their patchwork structure and obvious data issues rather than fixing them for a long time. It is not sufficient to say we already know about a given problem as a way of dismissing it. You have to fix it. Each bad record in Social Security is an exploitable weakness, with nobody to complain if fraud occurs.
