South Florida’s rampant Medicare fraud and federal attempts to stop it have taken on new prominence as President Obama and Congress struggle to pay for health-care legislation to cover the uninsured.

Democrats are counting on curbing fraud and abuse to keep the system solvent. Republicans say the hemorrhaging of taxpayer dollars in places like Miami just shows the government cannot be trusted to run health-care plans.

“It has gotten so easy to steal money from the federal government that organized crime has gotten involved,” Florida Senator George LeMieux recently told the Senate.

The region has a long history of smuggling, flimflam and sales of worthless swampland. It became the center for cocaine trafficking in the 1980s before a federal crackdown dispersed it. Now many criminal enterprises have turned to the lucrative practice Medicare fraud.

The nation’s first Medicare Fraud Strike Force, launched in South Florida in 2007, has become a model for federal enforcement in cities like Los Angeles, Detroit and Houston.

In the Miami area, the Strike Force obtained indictments against more than 300 people who billed Medicare for more than $700 million. Charges led to more than 150 guilty pleas and 20 trial convictions and the collection of more than $275 million of restitution.

Some say the region is especially prone to fraud because of the large concentration of low-income Medicare recipients and a huge medical industry, which produces many potential victims as well as culprits. To get kickbacks, patients pretend to receive treatment for diabetes or other health problems and turn their Medicare ID numbers over to criminals to bill the government.

Others point to the region’s especially disjointed ways of providing and paying for health care.

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