A letter in today’s Daily News objects to expanding Medicare because “it doesn’t work … About half the funds expended are for administration and fraud. It’s bankrupting the nation.”

His other arguments — whether the federal government should run a program such as this or not — are reasonable ones to raise, but I don’t think the first point is. If a program is corrupted with fraud but worthwhile doing, wouldn’t a better solution be to clean up the fraud and keep the program?

If not, wouldn’t the military be subject to the same argument? Military spending is certainly a huge contribution to the deficit — and would be even without the billions Bush has squandered in his pointless, stupid invasion of Iraq; millions have been wasted in Iraq on fraud, kickbacks and phony bills from contractors (and there’s fraud and corruption even outside Iraq); and the military accounting system is such total crap the military can’t even account for all the money it receives.

Is the solution that we should phase out the military? Or that we should fix it?

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