Health care fraud is common, but we don’t know how common. Overall estimates vary from 10% to 30% of healthcare spending or $140 to $420 billion. There have not been many efforts to measure fraud, and we know we’re only catching a fraction of the fraud, so we really don’t know how much there is.

In the US, we may be spending almost as much on healthcare fraud as on education. Healthcare spending is about 13% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), so we can estimate that one to four percent of our economy is healthcare fraud. That is a huge amount of money, especially when you consider that we only spend 4.5% of GNP for primary and secondary education.

Sources:
National Center for Education Statistics
Kaiser Family Foundation