No doubt you were shocked, shocked to learn that Jeffrey Hillman, the “barefoot beggar” who famously received a free pair of boots from a kindly NYPD cop, turned out to be a scam artist who preys on the kindness of strangers to provide him with an apartment, money and plenty of footwear — as a Post investigation discovered.

That’s right — someone pretending to be in dire straits turns out to be a) not destitute, b) not homeless and c) not shoeless.

But then, Hillman’s just a piker when it comes to the rising culture of sham dependency that is rapidly turning this country from a nation of self-reliant citizens to shuffling pseudo-mendicants and conniving criminals who have one hand extended to collect government largesse while the other is busily picking your pocket.

Consider the numbers:

* The Government Accountability Office estimates that improper — i.e., fraudulent — Medicare payments amount to at least $17 billion per annum. Other independent estimates run even higher — as much as one-fifth of total federal health-care spending (about $550 billion), according to one Harvard analyst.

And that’s before ObamaCare fully kicks in.

* A fresh source of abuse is the Bush-era prescription-drug benefit, which one physician’s publication has called “staggeringly complicated and largely incomprehensible to the very population it was intended to help . . .the drug program’s very complexity is a source of fraud.”

* The jobless recovery may equal misery for millions of Americans, but it’s created a boom in Social Security disability claims, many of them no doubt sheer gold-bricking via “personality disorders” and other imaginary illnesses.

Nearly 18 million people — one in 20 Americans — are collecting some $170 billion a year in disability payments, a record high, and the government estimates that fraud and other improper payments account for $25 billion of disability spending over a recent four-year period.

Like the “barefoot beggar,” who only needs to take his shoes off to get free stuff, Dependency Nation has learned how easy it is to take the government for a ride. In many cases, it’s simply a matter of correctly — if fraudulently — filling out the right forms and sending them in.

Unseen by human eyes, claims are processed by computer and checks go flying out in return; Medicare alone handles some 1.2 billion such claims annually.

Another tactic is fictitious patients and procedures: One dentist a few years ago bilked New York’s Medicaid program of more than $1 million in part by claiming she performed 991 procedures in a single day.

Organized crime has horned in on the act as well, setting up sham companies to fool the feds, stealing drugs meant for AIDS patients and getting kickbacks on unnecessary items such as motorized wheelchairs that Medicare is only too happy to shell out for.

In 2009, the Government Accountability Office catalogued examples of waste, fraud and abuse in just about every federal do-gooder program, including school lunches ($1.4 billion), children’s health insurance ($800 million, or roughly 15 percent of the total), the Earned Income Tax Credit ($12 billion), plus housing subsidies, child-care, unemployment insurance . . . You name it, and some sizable chunk of it is a scam.

In all, the cost to the taxpayers is estimated at some $100 billion a year.And things are only likely to get worse.

Take Social Security and Medicare, which together accounted for a whopping 36 percent of total federal expenditures in fiscal 2011. Everyone knows they’re unsustainable at current funding levels, so expect higher taxes. Yet more money going to the feds inevitably means more waste, fraud and abuse — because as famed robber Willie Sutton said of banks: That’s where the money is.

But in a kind of bureaucratic Catch-22, greater oversight would also mean more regulations and soaring enforcement costs, thus redirecting resources away from the very people the programs were meant to help — while still allowing the scam artists to enrich themselves.

Just ask Jeffrey Hilman, the “shoeless” man who, as it happens, has at least 30 pairs of shoes and boots — courtesy of the suckers.